Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 273

Chapter 273

Chapter 273

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The living room light was on and she could see them through the window before she reached the door.

Claire stood on the path for a moment, looking at her family gathered in the warm light inside, and tried to remember the last time she had seen them from the outside like this and understood that what she was looking at was the consequence of years of small decisions compounding into something none of them had planned.

She went in.

Three faces turned toward her at once. Marie was on her feet before the door had fully closed, moving across the room the way mothers moved when they had been frightened for hours and the person they were frightened for had finally appeared.

“Claire, where have you been? We have been calling you all evening.”

Josh was near the window where he had apparently been watching the street. “Your phone has been off.”

Josh Senior was in the armchair. He looked at her face with the expression of a man who had seen a lot of difficult things and was registering that whatever had happened to his daughter in the hours she had been gone had been something different from the usual.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Claire set her bag down on the nearest surface.

She did not answer.

The silence worried them more than anything she could have said would have, she could see that in each of their faces, and she sat down on the couch with her hands in her lap and looked at the carpet and let herself

have a moment.

Josh Senior cleared his throat.

“Alexander Kane’s lawyer called,” he said.

Claire’s head came up slowly.

“About an hour ago,” Josh Senior continued. “He called our lawyer, who called me.” He looked at her steadily. “The Kanes have decided they won’t be pursuing the maximum prison sentences.”

The room absorbed this.

Marie turned from Claire toward her husband. “What?”

“Apparently,” Josh Senior said, choosing the word carefully, “their children asked Alexander to show mercy.” He looked uncomfortable saying it. The discomfort of a man who had spent months telling himself the Kanes were the enemy and was now having to report that the enemy’s children had intervened on their behalf. “The hearing is still happening. But the scope of what they are asking the court for has changed.”

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Chapter 273

Nobody spoke.

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Josh was looking at the wall in the way he looked at walls when he was processing something that did not fit into the available categories.

And then Claire started crying.

Not quietly, not with the controlled performance of the videos, not strategically. Just the kind of crying that had been building in a park on an old swing for the better part of two hours and had arrived now in the living room of the house where she had grown up because the body had its own accounting and it was overdue.

“After everything we did,” she said, her voice breaking on every third word. “After all of it. They’re showing us mercy.” She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. “They’re better than us.” She shook her head. “They are genuinely better than us.”

Marie sat down beside her and put an arm around her and Claire leaned into it because she did not have the energy to do anything else.

When the crying had gone through its worst of itself and she was breathing more evenly, she looked at each of them.

Josh first. Then her mother. Then her father.

“I’ve spent years convincing all of you that Margaret was the villain,” she said. Her voice was steady now in the particular way it went steady after too much emotion, flat and stripped down to whatever was underneath the performance. “She wasn’t.”

Marie’s arm was still around her.

“I was,” Claire said.

Josh Senior’s face shifted.

“I stole David from her,” Claire said. “Not by accident. Not in some mutual thing that happened to two people equally. I planned it. I planned it while she was out and I executed it and then I cried before she could speak so that Mum and Dad would hear my version first.” She looked at her parents. “And you believed me. And you never once asked her.”

Marie’s hand tightened on her shoulder.

“I destroyed her life,” Claire said. “And then I spent the next years making sure that whenever she found something good, something that made it look like she might be alright, I found a way to feel cheated by it.” She looked at her hands. “When she married Marco I was jealous. When Lucia destroyed their marriage I was secretly glad. And when the affair came out publicly I was furious, not because of what had happened to my marriage, but because it gave Margaret a reason to be in the wrong and I couldn’t stand her being in the right.”

The room was very quiet.

“Do you know what she said to me today?” Claire said. “In that visiting room. She told me to go save my marriage.” She made a sound that was partway between a laugh and something that had no name. “The sister I spent years tearing apart told me to go fight for my husband.” She pressed her fingers against her eyes. “What have I become? What did I turn into while I was too busy deciding what I deserved?”

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Chapter 273

Josh leaned forward from his chair with his elbows on his knees.

“We blamed Margaret, Claire said. “We blamed Lucia. We blamed the Kanes. But every choice this family made after any of that, the press conferences, the videos, the lies we put on camera, the things we said about Monica, about a thirteen-year-old girl in front of millions of people.” She stopped. “Nobody forced us to do any of it. That was all us. Every single step.”

Josh looked at her for a long moment.

“I’ve been sitting with this all day,” he said quietly. “Since the park. Since Stella. He looked at the floor and then back up at the room. “I think it’s time we made one more video.

Claire looked at him.

“Not another strategy,” he said. “Not another angle. The truth. All of it. An apology to Margaret, to Lucia, to Alexander, to Monica. To everyone.” He looked at their parents. “We go on camera and we say what actually happened and we stop letting the last thing anyone hears from this family be the lies.”

Marie nodded before he had finished speaking. Slowly, like someone who had been waiting for the permission to agree.

“For the first time,” she said, “we stop pretending.” She looked at Claire with eyes that were wet and steady at the same time. “Your children deserve to know who their mother actually is. Not the version we’ve been performing. The real one.”

Josh Senior stood up.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

The three of them looked at him.

“Do you have any idea what that would do?” He pointed at the television. “The media will have everything they need. People will repeat it for years. We will never recover from it. Everything this family has worked for…”

“We’re already destroyed,” Claire said.

She said it quietly, with no heat in it, the way you said something that was simply true.

Josh Senior looked at his daughter.

“We have been lying to ourselves,” she said. “All of it. The campaign, the story we told, the version of Margaret we constructed. We knew it wasn’t real. We knew we were building something that wasn’t solid. And we kept building because stopping meant admitting what was underneath.” She looked at him directly. “I am tired of it, Dad. I am tired of all of it.”

“If we go on camera and tell the whole truth,” Josh Senior said, “we become the biggest disgrace this country has seen in years.”

“We already are,” Claire said.

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