Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 261

Chapter 261

Chapter 261

The photograph was creased along one fold from being folded too many times. Margaret sat on the edge of her bunk with it in both hands, the afternoon light from the high window falling at an angle that landed just past her feet and left her in the cooler shadow at the edge of it. The cell smelled of cleaning fluid and the particular stale heat of a space that never fully aired, the smell she had stopped consciously registering months ago.

Marco looked back at her from the photograph.

It was from the early months. A candid shot, not a posed one, his face caught in the middle of something he was enjoying, the specific expression of a man who did not know he was being looked at. She had chosen it because it was the most him. Not performing. Just present. Just alive in a way that had nothing to do with what came after, with the basement or the gun or the moment that ended everything between them.

She looked at it the way she had been looking at it every day since the photograph was permitted. She had not spoken to anyone about this daily ritual. It was not something the other women in the cell needed to know about. They already knew enough to torment her with.

“I wish you were still here,” she said, her voice barely above a sound. “Not for me. I know I don’t deserve that. But for Monica. For Ria and Lucas. For your son.” She pressed her thumb to the corner of the photograph, careful not to crease it further. “They should have had more time with you. The version of you that came down those stairs in the morning. The father they knew before I broke everything.” She stopped and swallowed hard. “I am sorry, Marco. I am so sorry.”

The laughter started from the top bunk.

Denise sat up and looked down at her, the expression on her face already performing contempt before she even opened her mouth. She had been waiting for an audience to form before she began. She always was. *There she goes again,” Denise announced to the room. “Talking to her dead husband’s picture. The man she shot.” She raised her eyebrows at Sharon, who was sitting cross-legged on the opposite bunk with a magazine she was no longer reading. “Shot him in front of his kid and now she sits there every afternoon like she’s the grieving widow. Like her feelings matter.”

Sharon let out a short hard laugh. “She’s not the widow. She’s the murderer.”

“I know,” Margaret said quietly, and she meant it in a way that went deeper than her simple answer. She knew what she was. She had made peace with it in the way you make peace with something that will never leave

you.

“You know,” Denise repeated, mimicking her voice in a pitch that was slightly higher and laden with contempt. Oh, she knows. She regrets it. She wishes she could turn back time.” She leaned forward over the edge of her bunk, close enough that Margaret could see the detail of her expression, the amusement in it that had no warmth behind it. “How many times a day do you think about how you ruined your own life? Or do you mostly just cry at his picture like it’s going to change anything?”

Margaret set the photograph down on the bunk beside her, placing it carefully so the light still caught Marco’s face. She did not answer Denise. She had learned months ago that answering only gave the other women more to work with. Silence was cleaner. Silence was its own kind of resistance.

Denise waited for a response that did not come, and something in her expression shifted slightly, the pleasure of baiting someone deflating when the bait was not taken. “Your own mother doesn’t visit you anymore,” she said, trying a different angle. “Your brother stopped calling. Your sister gave up on you.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bunk, preparing to get down. “Must be a special kind of person to make your own family that ashamed.”

Margaret understood the mechanics of this. She had been in the cell long enough to recognize the patterns, the way Denise tested boundaries and escalated when she found weak points. The weakness was not in Margaret’s resistance. The weakness was in the fact that Denise could say things that landed somewhere truthful.

Chapter 261

Her family had stopped visiting. Her father had not come at all. Her siblings had sent letters through the lawyer, formal and distant, caring only about the legal proceedings. Only her mother had come, and those visits had been transactions, conversations with a purpose. Marie had come to get something, deliver a message, ensure Margaret would cooperate with whatever came next.

Margaret had not expected love during those visits. She had learned long ago that love in her family was conditional on usefulness. What she had not expected was for the visits to stop entirely.

Sharon went to the storage area and came back with the brush and cleaning solution, holding them toward Margaret with the expression of someone performing helpfulness for an audience. The other women were waiting to see what Margaret would do, whether she would refuse and trigger what came after that, or whether she would comply and end this particular episode sooner.

Margaret took the materials without comment.

She stood and walked toward the bathroom at the back of the cell, her knees already aching from the previous time she had done this, from the cold of the tile floor pressing into her bones for hours. She did not say anything about the pain. She had learned, as she had learned everything in this place, that saying things only ever made them worse. The other women in the cell did not care if her knees hurt. They cared about compliance and entertainment. Pain made you more entertaining.

She was at the bathroom door when the cell door opened.

A guard stood in the entrance, clipboard in hand. He looked at the room with the minimal attention of a man who had many cells to visit and was visiting this one because the schedule said so. His gaze did not really land on anyone. He was simply reading the list he needed to get through before the end of his shift.

“Hart.”

Margaret stopped. She had the brush in one hand and the cleaning solution in the other, and something in her chest had already begun to shift at the sound of her name spoken that way, with that specific formality that meant something official.

“Visitor,” the guard said.

Margaret set the materials down against the wall. “Who is it?”

He glanced at the clipboard without expression. “Marie Lowe. Your mother.”

The cell went very still.

Margaret did not know what had happened in the outside world since her press conference. She did not know where things stood with her family, whether the anger she had last seen on their faces when they walked out of the visiting room had softened or hardened or transformed into something else entirely. She did not know what the lawsuit had produced, whether the public had moved on, whether any of the noise of the past weeks had changed anything about the way her family thought about her.

What she knew was the pattern of Marie’s visits.

Her mother came when she needed something. Every visit had had a purpose woven through it like thread through fabric. Information. Money. Signatures. Cooperation in something the family was planning. Marie would come in with the careful performance of a concerned mother and leave with whatever she had come to get. Margaret had never expected anything else from those visits. She had built her expectations low enough that they could almost never be disappointed.

But her mother had stopped coming.

Margaret thought about what was left to get.

She had given everything to Monica. The transfer was complete and documented, verified by lawyers and courts. She had given the penthouse and the jewelry to the family through Mr. Harrison. Her bank accounts had been emptied long ago to help with the legal fees. There was nothing in any account connected to her name, no property, no investment, no hidden asset waiting to be discovered. She had nothing left that anyone could want.

So what did her mother want?

Chapter 261

The question sat in her chest without an answer, like something she had been asked in a language she was still learning to speak.

She thought about the last time she had seen Marie’s face during a prison visit. The coldness of it. The walk. out without looking back. She thought about the visit before that, and the one before that, each one colder than the last, each one carrying less hope than the previous.

She did not know which version was coming through the visiting room door today.

She did not know if there was a version she had not yet seen.

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