Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 267

Chapter 267

The childhood bedroom felt like someone else’s room now. Josh had been sleeping there since the house at home became the wrong kind of quiet, the quiet of a space that used to hold two people and now held one. He lay on the same single bed he had slept in until he was seventeen, the mattress too small for him now, his feet reaching the footboard, the ceiling above him unchanged from twenty years ago, the small water stain in the corner from the winter his window leaked still visible in the pale morning light.

The framed ultrasound was on the nightstand.

He had brought it from home, one of the things he had packed alongside the practical things, clothes and charger, and it had been the last thing he put in the bag and the first thing he had taken out. It was only a photograph of shapes, grey and white, the particular blur of early imaging, but the nurse had pointed to the outline and said there is your baby and Stella had pressed his hand so hard against the paper sheet of the examination table that her knuckles went white. He picked it up now and lay there in the early morning looking at it, at the shapes that were supposed to mean something, at the future that had felt so certain weeks ago.

Six days.

He had been counting them the way people counted things they were afraid of, marking off time rather than living through it. The counting had become the only thing that made sense when everything else had stopped making sense. Somewhere in the counting he had stopped thinking about what was coming and started thinking only about lawyers and hearings and the specific quality of fear that came from trying to imagine what a prison sentence looked like from the inside. He sat up and put the photograph in his jacket pocket with the care of someone handling something precious that he had no right to handle.

He went to find his car keys as he drove to Stella home.

Marcus Williams answered the door. He looked at Josh with the expression of a man who had already decided how this visit would go and was prepared to enforce that decision without apology. Not hostile exactly. Just completely without the warmth that had once been there when Josh rang this doorbell, when Williams had known him as a man, not as a threat to his daughter.

“She doesn’t want to see you,” Williams said.

“Five minutes,” Josh said. “I’m not here to argue. I just need to see her.”

“Josh…”

“Please.” The word came out differently from how he intended it. Raw. Without the performance of dignity he usually kept in place when Williams was involved. “Please. Just ask her.”

Williams looked at him for a long moment. He was a man who understood leverage and he was reading Josh now, trying to determine whether this was another iteration of the same pattern that had been repeating for weeks. Then he turned and walked toward the bottom of the stairs and called Stella’s name into the silence of

the house.

A silence from upstairs that stretched on.

Then: “Dad, Who is it?”

“Josh,” Williams said.

Another silence. This one longer. Long enough that Josh wondered if she would say no, long enough that he was preparing himself to leave without seeing her.

“Fine,” Stella said.

She came down slowly. She was wearing the house clothes she wore when she wasn’t going anywhere, the loose jumper that had always been a size too large for her and was now exactly right, fitting over the

way that caught Josh somewhere under the ribs because he pregnancy that was undeniably, visibly there in had not seen her in days and the days had changed things, or perhaps they had not changed things and he had simply stopped looking at her carefully enough to notice.

1/4

Chapter 267

He reached toward her without thinking.

She stepped back. One step, quiet and small, and she was not angry when she did it, not making a point, she simply moved and the distance opened between them and he stood with his hand out in the air with nowhere to go.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Better than last week.”

“Are you eating properly? The doctor said you needed to maintain your nutrition and…”

“The doctor is happy,” she said. Not cold. Just measured. The temperature of a woman who had decided to be civil but not more than civil. “The baby is healthy. Everything is progressing normally.”

He looked at her face and tried to find in it the version of her he knew, the one who had called him from the bathroom holding the test with both hands like it was the most fragile thing in the world, the one who had sat beside him in the examination room with her knuckles white. She was all of those versions of herself. She was also the version that had packed a bag and driven away with her father’s hand on her shoulder, leaving him alone in a house that had suddenly felt like a monument to every mistake he had made.

“Are you ever coming home?” he asked.

She did not answer immediately. She looked at her own hands, at the ring she was still wearing, and he noticed it and felt something collapse slightly in his chest because he had not been sure she would still be wearing it.

“I love you,” she said. “I want you to know that. I haven’t stopped.”

“Then come home.”

“Love is not the only thing a marriage needs,” she said. She looked at him steadily and her voice remained level, which was somehow worse than if she had been angry. “I cannot raise a child in a house full of what your family has been doing. I cannot let our baby grow up watching their father choose pride over decency over and over and calling it protection.” She moved slightly and he realized she was preparing to leave, that this conversation had a time limit and she was moving them toward the end of it. “Our baby deserves a father who knows when he is wrong and says so.”

“I was protecting my family,” Josh said. He heard the defensiveness in his own voice and could not remove it.” Margaret started all of this. The Kanes had resources we couldn’t fight any other way. I only…”

“Did Monica deserve to be grabbed outside her school?”

The question stopped him. There was nothing in Stella’s tone that was accusatory. She had simply asked it, plain and direct, the way she asked things when she had decided that emotion was not the tool she needed.

Josh said nothing.

“Did she?” Stella asked again.

“That was not…. that wasn’t the point,” he said. His voice came out defensive and he knew it and could not change it. “I was angry and I needed…”

“Did that little girl deserve to be called a thief? To have her own school community turn on her because she was connected to a family your family decided to destroy?”

He looked away.

“Did your sister deserve to spend her whole childhood believing that nobody in her family loved her? Did she deserve to have her childhood stolen by parents who ignored her? Did she deserve to end up in prison?”

Josh looked at the wall beside the doorway of the sitting room.

“Who protected Margaret,” Stella said, “from her own family?”

The silence after that was different from the silences that had come before. It had weight to it that the others had not, the weight of something without a good answer, and Josh stood in it and felt it pressing down on him and could not find the angle that made it look different or better or anything other than what it was.

2/4

Chapter 267

“I wasn’t the only one who made mistakes,” he said. He heard how it sounded. He said it anyway because it was what he believed, or what he had been believing until Stella started asking questions that made it harder to keep believing it. “Everyone made mistakes. Why should I be the one to shoulder all of this? Why should! be the one everyone is asking to fix it?”

“Because someone has to be the first adult.”

Stella said it simply. Without anger, without contempt, just the plain fact of it, the observation that was also a judgment.

“I am not apologising to the Kanes,” he said.

“Not even to Margaret?”

The question was out before he could prepare for it and his answer came the same way, immediately, without thought.

“No.”

The sitting room was very quiet around them. He could hear the sound of Williams somewhere in the house, moving deliberately as if to give them privacy while also making sure he remained aware of what was happening.

Stella looked at him with the expression he had seen from her once before, on the day she had stood in the doorway of the family house and told his family they were all delusional. Not anger. Disappointment. The kind that came from expecting more and having been wrong to expect it.

“If you keep going down this road you are going to lose me,” she said. “You are going to lose this baby. You are going to lose yourself.” She moved toward the door of the sitting room. “You should go, Josh.” “I’m not leaving,” he said.

Williams appeared in the hallway. He did not raise his voice. He simply took his phone out of his pocket and looked at Josh with the expression of a man who was prepared to make a call and would not enjoy doing so but would do it anyway. It was a clear message. The boundary was there and it was not a suggestion. Josh looked at his father-in-law. He looked at Stella in the doorway, at the baby she was carrying that was half him and half his future and half his hope and entirely beyond his reach now.

He went.

At the threshold Stella’s voice came from behind him, quieter than anything she had said in the whole conversation.

“When you’re ready to stop defending yourself and start fixing yourself,” she said, “come back.”

The door closed.

He sat in the car in the driveway for three minutes without starting the engine. The steering wheel was cool under his hands. The morning was grey outside the windscreen. He thought about going back to his parents’ house and lying on the too-small bed and looking at the water stain on the ceiling until six days became five days and five became four and eventually the hearing would be there.

He ended up in the park without having decided to go there. He simply drove until the driving stopped making sense and the park was where he was, the place where paths crossed and children played and ordinary people did ordinary things. It was a weekday morning and the park was quieter than it would be on weekends, the energy softer.

There were children near the path. A man was crouching in the grass, holding the back of a small bicycle, his daughter balanced on it with her tongue between her teeth, her face concentrated with the effort of believing in herself. He let go. She wobbled and recovered and pedaled forward and turned back to find him already running after her, laughing, the two of them moving in the orbit of people who knew each other completely and were building something together without needing to name it.

Josh watched them from the bench.

He remembered telling Stella they could teach their child to ride a bike in the park near their house. He

3/4

Chapter 267

remembered picking names late on a Tuesday night with the television off and the list on a notepad between. them. He remembered what he had said: I’ll be different from my father. I mean it. I promise you that.

He thought about the promise now and what it had cost him to break it, or whether he had actually kept it in ways he had not understood. He thought about his father and the specific patterns of men and what it meant to be the first one to change.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify