Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 274

Chapter 274

Chapter 274

The clock on the nightstand said 2:47.

Claire lay on top of the covers in the childhood bedroom, still dressed, her shoes on the floor where she had dropped them, and she stared at the ceiling and listened to the house breathe around her and could not sleep.

Every time she closed her eyes the voices came.

David: Our marriage ended a long time ago. Today I’m just putting it on paper.

Margaret: We’ve spent enough years hurting each other. Go and fight for your marriage.

She lay there and thought about both of them. About how each had every reason to give her nothing and had given her something anyway. Margaret, whose life Claire had carved up piece by piece across years, had told her to go save her marriage. David, who had just filed for divorce, had stood in a doorway and offered her a path back if she chose it.

Two people she had spent years deciding were against her.

Both of them had shown her more grace than she had ever shown either of them.

She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth.

“How did I become this person?” she said to the ceiling.

No answer.

She lay there for another hour, moving through the dark of it without arriving anywhere that offered rest, and then she got up and pulled the storage box from under the bed where she had put it years ago when she moved back in temporarily the first time something with David had been difficult enough to require retreat.

The photographs were toward the top.

The wedding. She in the white dress she had chosen herself, everything chosen herself, every detail controlled and managed until the event was perfect on the surface. David in his suit with the face she now understood was the face of resignation wearing patience as a second skin.

David holding Clara the day she was born, the raw expression of a man in the specific moment of understanding that love had arrived in a form he had not prepared for.

Clinton’s first birthday with the cake on his face and the look of outrage that had made everyone laugh.

And at the bottom, smaller, the edges soft with age.

She and Margaret as children.

She did not know who had taken it. She did not remember the day. She looked about nine, which would have made Margaret six, and Margaret had her arms around Claire’s waist from the side, cheek pressed against her arm, eyes slightly closed, the expression of a small child pressing into someone they trusted completely.

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Claire looked at this photograph for a long time.

“You loved me,” she said.

She said it to the photograph and meant the child in it, the nine-year-old who had no idea yet that her sister was going to spend the next thirty years competing with her, taking from her, hating the shape of her happiness.

The tears came again and she let them.

After a while she picked up her phone.

She opened David’s contact and pressed Call before she had finished deciding to and then ended it before the first ring. She sat on the edge of the bed holding the phone.

She knew he would not answer.

She knew that if she called him tonight, at this hour, with her voice like this, it would be more of the same, another attempt to reach him on her timeline, another imposition of her needs onto whatever peace he had managed to find.

She pressed Record.

She held the phone in front of her and looked at the small red circle of it for a long moment.

Then she started speaking.

“David.” She stopped. Her voice was wrong, still wet from crying, and she did not try to clear it. “I don’t know if you’ll listen to this. Maybe you’ve already blocked the number. Maybe you’ve already decided there’s nothing left worth hearing from me.” A pause. “If that’s true, I understand.”

She breathed in slowly.

“For the first time in my life I don’t want to defend myself. I want to say something true. Something I have spent twenty years making sure nobody in this family was ever allowed to say out loud.”

She looked at the photograph of her and Margaret on the bedspread beside her.

“I spent months blaming Margaret for what happened to our marriage. Today I admitted something I’ve been burying since before you and I were even together.” She stopped. “I stole you. Not because I loved you more than she did. Not because you chose me over her. Because I couldn’t stand watching my own sister be happy when I was not.” The words came out steady and broken in equal measure. “I saw what she had with you and I decided it wasn’t fair. And I made sure it didn’t stay hers.”

She pressed her lips together.

“I destroyed her. And then I spent the years after convincing everyone she deserved to be destroyed. I convinced my parents. I convinced Josh. I convinced myself.” A pause. “I convinced you, didn’t I. That you had married the wronged one. That she was the one who had made things hard for us.”

She looked at the clock. 3:11.

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“You were a good husband,” she said. “You tried longer than anyone should have had to. You kept asking me to come back to you, to come back to us, and I kept choosing the next move instead. The next argument. The next way to make sure someone else hurt the way I hurt.” Her voice went quieter. “You were never competing with Margaret. You never had been. You were competing with my anger. And my anger was always going to

win.”

A long silence.

“I ruined Margaret’s life,” she said. “I ruined our marriage. I ruined our children’s family.” She did not try to soften any of it. “Nobody else did that. I did. Not Margaret. Not Lucia. Not the Kanes. Me.”

Another silence, longer.

“I am not asking you to forgive me,” she said. “I am not asking you to stop the divorce. I don’t think I’ve earned either of those things and I am not going to sit here at three in the morning and ask for them the way I used to ask for things, as if wanting them badly enough was the same as deserving them.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“For once I just wanted to tell you something true. Without wanting anything back from it.”

She looked at the photograph of Clara and Clinton’s faces, both of them looking up at the camera, not knowing their parents’ marriage was running out of time above their heads.

“Tomorrow I am going to tell the whole country what actually happened,” she said. “No more videos with a strategy behind them. No more careful framing. Just what happened, from me, on camera, to whoever is willing to listen.” She paused. “Clara and Clinton deserve a mother who tells the truth. Even if the truth makes me the villain of the story. Because I am the villain of the story and they should know that their mother eventually understood that.”

She sat with the phone for a moment.

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