Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 262

1 Likes

Chapter 262

Chapter 262

Marie was already seated when Margaret walked into the visiting room.

She was at the same table they always used, the one nearest the window, and she was sitting differently from the other times. No coat collar pulled straight. No bag positioned on the table like a barrier. No hands folded with the practiced composure she had always brought to these visits. She was just sitting, her coat still on but loose, her hands in her lap, and she looked smaller than Margaret remembered.

Margaret sat down across from her.

She set her hands flat on the table and looked at her mother and waited.

Marie opened her mouth.

“We found your letters,” she said.

Margaret looked at her.

“The box,” Marie said. “In the spare room. There was a letter. From when you were young.” Her voice had a quality Margaret had not heard from her before, not in all the visits, not in all the years. Stripped of something. “There were more inside. All of them. The ones you wrote and never gave anyone.”

Margaret did not move.

“We read them,” Marie said. “I read them out loud. To your father and Claire and Josh.” Her throat moved.” Margaret. I am sorry.”

The visiting room went on around them, other tables with other conversations, chairs scraping tile, a guard’s radio crackling somewhere near the far wall. Margaret sat in the middle of all of it and looked at her mother’s face and waited for the part that came after.

“I am sorry,” Marie said again.

Margaret looked at the table. “What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Mum.” She looked up. “Every time you have sat in that chair you have wanted something. What is it this time?” “Nothing,” Marie said. “I promise you there is nothing. I came because I read what you wrote when you were eleven years old and I could not sit in the house after reading it.” Her eyes were wet now, properly wet, the kind that came before crying. “I could not sit there knowing you were here.”

Margaret studied her mother’s face the way you studied something you had looked at for years without fully seeing, checking for the performance she knew so well, the calculation underneath the expression. She had watched Marie perform grief for cameras. She had watched her perform reason in visiting rooms. She knew every register her mother used.

She could not find the performance in this one.

Which frightened her more than finding it would have.

“What did the letter say?” Margaret asked. “What do you remember from it?”

“I remember everything from it,” Marie said. “Word for word. I have been hearing it in my head since yesterday. She pressed her lips together. “You said you tried hard at school to make your father proud. That you got good marks and waited for someone to be excited. Nobody was.”

Margaret’s hands were still flat on the table.

“You said you just wanted to feel like you belonged there,” Marie said. “The same way Claire and Josh belonged. You said sometimes you felt like you had arrived by accident.”

Something moved in Margaret’s chest. She kept her face still.

“You said if you ever had a daughter,” Marie continued, her voice going quieter as she got closer to the end of

e stopped. “You wrote that at eleven it, “you would make sure she never felt in

Successfully unlocked!

1/3

Chapter 262

years old. And you folded it up and put it in a box and you never gave it to anyone.”

The visiting room was very loud.

Or perhaps it was not loud at all. Perhaps it was the same level it had always been. Margaret was having difficulty calibrating the sounds around her against the sound of her own pulse.

“We also found the other letters,” Marie said. “The ones you wrote to each of us. Still sealed. And the journal. And the award from the art competition.” Her voice cracked on the last one. “You won a competition. First prize. And we never came.”

“No,” Margaret said. “You didn’t.”

Silence.

“I am sorry,” Marie said, for the third time. And this time she reached forward across the table and put her hand over Margaret’s hand and Margaret felt the warmth of it and sat very still inside the feeling of it, not pulling away, not closing toward it, just holding very still the way you held still when you were not sure yet whether something was real.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Margaret said finally.

“You don’t have to say anything,” Marie said.

And that was the wrong thing to say, or perhaps the right thing, because the specific absence of a demand, the first time in Margaret’s life her mother had said nothing was required, broke something open that all the previous times had not been able to reach.

“You compared me to Claire every time I came home from school,” Margaret said. Her voice came out low and unsteady and she did not try to fix it. “Claire’s reports were better. Claire’s friends were nicer. Claire knew how to dress herself properly. You never said it like it was cruel. You said it like it was just information.” She looked at her mother’s hand over hers. “But I heard it. Every time. I heard what was underneath it, which was that Claire was the version of a daughter you actually wanted and I was the other one.”

Marie did not speak.

“Dad called me useless,” Margaret said. “Not just that last time. My whole life. When I dropped something, when I failed at something, when I did not do a thing the way he thought it should be done. Useless.” She looked at the table. “Do you know what it does to a child to hear that word enough times? You start to hear it in your own head when he is not in the room. You start to check everything you do against it.”

Her voice was shaking now.

“And the relatives,” she said. “Auntie Barbara telling her friends at the family reunion that I was the difficult one. That Josh and Claire were the ones to watch but Margaret was the one nobody knew what to do with.” She pressed her palm harder against the table underneath Marie’s hand. “I was eight years old at that reunion. I heard her say it from behind the door. I went and sat in the garden for an hour and I told myself it didn’t matter.”

“Margaret-”

“There was a summer,” Margaret said, and now her voice broke properly on the word summer and she let it because there was nothing left to protect in this visiting room at this table. “I must have been nine or ten. I kept getting in trouble at home for small things. Things that children do. Spilling something. Being too loud. Forgetting something I was told. And Dad would put me in the basement.”

She looked at her mother.

“He would lock the door,” she said. “And leave me there until he decided I had thought about what I had done. An hour sometimes. Longer sometimes.” Her breath was coming unevenly now. “It was dark in the basement. And cold. And I would sit on the bottom step and wait for the door to open and I would tell myself that I would be better next time. That if I was good enough next time he would not do it again.”

Marie’s face had gone very pale.

“I kept being nine years old in that basement,” Margaret said, “for my entire life. I kept telling myself that if ! was good enough, if I got something right, if I found the right person to love me the way I needed to be loved,

2/3

Chapter 262

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify