Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 260

Chapter 260-

Chapter 260

The bed was cold on Stella’s side.

Josh had not slept properly. He had woken twice in the night reaching across to a space that was flat and undisturbed and had both times taken several seconds to remember why. The third time he woke he had lain on his back and stared at the ceiling and not tried to sleep again because the ceiling was easier thar, the remembering. At seven in the morning he sat up and looked at the room that was no longer quite his room anymore, the space that had been half-full now feeling empner than any truly vacant place could feel.

Her shoes were still by the wardrobe. She had left in a hurry and not taken them, the ones she wore most days, the low or she said were comfortable for her feet now that she was this far along. She would need to come back for them eventually. He had held onto that thought twice since yesterday, the shoes by the wardrobe, and both times he had understood he was using it to avoid acknowledging the larger thing. If she came back for her shoes, maybe that meant she was coming back for other things. Maybe that meant this was temporary and containable and not actually the end of everything he had believed about his future.

He picked up his phone and called her.

It rang seven times and went to voicemail. The sound of her recorded voice asking him to leave a message felt like a door closing. He tried her mother. Voicemail immediately, the kind that picked up before the second ring, the kind that happened when someone rejected a call rather than missed it. He tried her sister. Same. He tried the one friend of Stella’s whose number he had, a woman named Patricia who he had met three times at dinners, and Patricia’s phone rang twice and then disconnected, which was a different category entirely from voicemail. That was deliberate. That was intentional

He sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in his lap and understood that everyone who mattered to Stella had decided not to listen to him.

He tried Williams.

Williams answered on the second ring.

“Joshua,” he said. His voice was not unkind. It was simply the voice of a man who had said what needed saying the previous day and was not going to say it again.

“She won’t pick up,” Josh said.

“I know.”

“Is she alright?

“She is at the house with us,” Williams said. “She is alright.”

“Will you tell her to call me?”

A pause. Not long. Long enough to contain a decision being made, the careful calibration of how much to say to a man whose marriage was dissolving in real time.

She knows the number. Williams said. “She will call when she is ready to call. What I can tell you is that she is not ready today. Another pause and this one carried weight. “Joshua. My daughter chose to marry you. That choice is hers and I have advans, respectand. But I am watching her right now from across this kitchen and she is sitting at my table caling breakfast ared now books like someone who has put something very heavy down after carrying it for a long time. His voice was

week wat onderneath it was something harder. “The best thing you can do for your wife right now is to do what she Clean das op. Make & scop Do right by her and by the child she is carrying. When you have done those things call

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Chapter 260-

ene went que

Josh sat on the bed after the call ended and looked at Stella’s shoes by the wardrobe.

He thought about the hallway yesterday. About the box his mother had found. About Claire reading the letter in a voice that had started controlled and ended broken. He heard the words again now the way he had heard them the first time, in Margaret’s round careful handwriting, the specific handwriting of a child who had not yet decided whether she was worth taking up space with.

I don’t want to be special. I just want to feel like I belong here.

Josh set the phone down on the nightstand and sat with that for a moment. Just sat with it. The question it raised was not comfortable and he was aware that he had not been comfortable since yesterday’s hallway, that something in the box and the letter had opened something in him that the previous weeks of fighting had been keeping sealed.

Had they neglected Margaret?

He turned the word over in his mind. Neglected was the kind of word social workers used, the kind that came with legal definitions and formal categories. What they had done did not fit that word exactly. Nobody had failed to feed her or clothe her or house her. Nobody had raised a hand to her. There were photographs from Christmases and birthdays, evidence of a family that occupied the same space and shared the same occasions.

But the letter.

I waited for someone to be excited. Nobody was very excited.

Josh stood up abruptly and crossed the room and picked up the shoes from beside the wardrobe and put them inside it and closed the door. He did not examine why he did this. He just could not look at them anymore. He needed this to have a cleaner shape. He needed Margaret to be the cause of everything the way she had been the cause of everything for the past months, the woman who had chosen destruction, who had cost him his marriage, who had given away money that should have helped them recover

That was the version he needed. That was the only version he could live with.

The noise started downstairs before he had finished needing it.

His mother’s voice first, sharper than usual, carrying up through the floor in a way her voice rarely did because she was nos a woman who usually made her displeasure loud. His father’s voice underneath hers, lower, resistant. The specific rhythm of two people in a real argument as opposed to the managed kind, the kind where someone had finally run out of pagence for the pretense.

Josh went downstairs.

His parents were in the hallway. His mother had her coat on, her bag on her shoulder, her keys in her hand. His father was standing between her and the front door with the expression of a man who had decided he was the last barrier and intended to hold that line.

“You are not going” Josh Senior said.

“Grout of my way” Marie said.

“She put us in this position. She is the reason our family is in the newspapers, the reason we have been arrested, the reaso Stella bas left If you walk buto that prison and sit across from her you are telling her that everything she did wax

“Lain nut telling ber anything of the von Marie sand. Tam telling her that her mother is still her mother

Jush ranie to the button of the stairy and looked at their both. He head his oven one before be

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Chapter 200

speak, the certainty in it feeling very young and very sure.

“Mum” he said. “Leave her. She is ungrateful. She made her choices. She is where the is because of what he did and ping to visit her now changes nothing

Marie turned to look at her son.

“Ungrateful?” she said. The word had a quality to it that Josh had not heard from his mother before Something had b open in her, he could see it in her face, whatever had been sitting sealed since the letter now no longer contained “Bos calling Margaret ungrateful.”

“She threw away everything,” Josh said. His voice was climbing. “She threw away the money that could have saved the family. She threw away her life and now she expects us to…”

The slap was not hard but it was very fast.

Marie’s hand connected with the side of his face and the sound of it in the hallway was much louder than the force bett it. Josh stopped talking. He put his hand to his cheek and stared at his mother. He had never been slapped by her in hie

“Margaret,” Marie said, her voice shaking now, the controlled quality of it fractured completely, is not ungrateful. Margamen has never in her entire life done anything to this family except try to earn her place in it and be told she had not done enough.” Her eyes were wet but her expression was not soft. It was the expression of a woman who had been arring something since the hallway yesterday and had finally run out of capacity to sit with it quietly. We made her what taught her that love was something you had to earn. We taught her that belonging was conditional on being good enough and she was never good enough, no matter what she did.”

She held his eyes and he could not look away.

“Your father has called her useless to her face. You have treated her like she was the family failure. I stood by and lerr happen because it was easier than facing what we were doing.” Her voice broke on the last word and she held it together force. “Everything that is happening to this family right now is because we broke her. It started in this house long before Lucia Kane. It started in this house.”

The hallway was completely still.

Josh Senior had moved away from the door. He was standing near the wall now, not blocking anyone, his arms at looking at his wife with the expression he had been wearing since the hallway and the box. The expression of a man watching his choices come home to him.

The front door opened.

Claire stepped in from outside, her coat still on, a coffee cup in her hand, and she took in the scene in the bab long look. Her mother’s coat and bag. Her brother’s hand still raised toward his cheek. Her father’s positit again The specific quality of a silence that came after something irrevocable had been said.

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