Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 281

Chapter 281

The prenatal appointment w Jomorrow morning.

Josh said it to himself quietly as he drove, the specific repetition of someone who needed to hold onto a thing before they could rest. Not reconciliation. Not Stella coming home. Just tomorrow morning, eight–thirty, the clinic on Meridian Street and he was going to be there. That was enough for now. That was, in fact, more than he had earned the right to have.

One step at a time, Monica had said. She had not actually said that. But it was the shape of what she had meant, and be carried it with him the way he had been carrying the ultrasound photograph, as something small and real in the middle of everything that was large and uncertain.

He turned into the road and saw the front door open before he had even parked.

He heard the voice before he got out of the car.

His father’s.

He sat for one second listening to the specific register of it, the particular frequency of Josh Senior in full collapse, the voice he had heard rarely and that always meant something had broken past the point where the usual management of things was available to him.

Josh went inside.

The living room looked like the inside of whatever had been happening for the hours he had been gone. His father was moving, not going anywhere but needing to be in motion, the anxious circling of a man whose body could not sit still while his world fell apart around it. Marie was on the sofa with her hands in her lap and the expression of someone who had already gone through the active part of this and was now simply waiting for it to reach whatever it was going to reach. Claire stood near the fireplace with her arms at her sides and her face carefully arranged, the face she wore when she was managing herself in proximity to something loud.

Josh Senior saw his son come through the door.

“There he is,” he said. His voice was ragged at the edges. “The final member of this disaster, finally arrived.”

Josh looked at his mother and his mother looked back at him and told him nothing with her expression because there was nothing to tell that he could not already see.

“Dad.” He kept his voice level. “What happened.”

Josh Senior’s laugh was the sound of a man who had stopped finding things funny some time ago. “What happened.” He picked up his phone from the sofa and threw it back down without doing anything with it. “Fil tell you what happened.”

He had gone to his club in the morning. The men he had spent three decades sitting across from, playing cards with, sharing meals with, the friendships built from the specific slow accumulation of proximity and time, had all discovered simultaneously that they had other things to be doing. Not one of them had sat beside him. He had stood at the bar for eleven minutes and the room had moved around him and nobody had moved toward him and eventually he had understood what was happening and left.

His older brother had called.

“He said he was ashamed to share my surname,” Josh Senior said. The specific flatness of delivering that information was its own kind of devastation, the way things went flat when they had already finished hurting and become simply facts. “More than fourty years since we were children in the same house and he called me to say that.”

Another sibling, the same.

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“He didn’t have the nerve to say it directly,” Josh Senior said. “He called it a voluntary resignation. Said it would be better for everyone. He looked at the window. “Better for everyone” He repeated it the way you repeated something that had not stopped being incomprehensible. “Like I actually had a choice about whether to volunteer.

He had gone into the office first briefly, to collect things, and the room had done what the club had done, people discovering other directions to look, conversations lowering and then resuming after he passed, one person looking at him with a specific pity that was worse than hostility because pity required no engagement, just observation from a safe distance.

“Forty years.” Josh Senior said. He was no longer looking at any of them in particular. He was somewhere in the middle distance, somewhere in the space between what he had built and what remained of it. “Forty years I spent building something in this city. My name meant something. People knew who I was.” He pressed his fist against his chest the way he did when he was containing something he could not otherwise contain. “Gone. All of it. Because my family decided to go on television and tell the whole country what we are.”

He turned and looked at Claire.

“This is yours,” he said.

Claire did not step back.

You pushed it. You wanted the video. You wanted the confession. You wanted the clean conscience.” His voice was climbing again, ragged with grief dressed as anger the way his grief had always dressed itself. “Well. There you are. There is your clean conscience and there is what it cost us.”

“Dad,” Claire said.

“Don’t call me that while you’re standing in the rubble of everything I built,” he said.

Claire let the air settle for a moment.

“The video didn’t destroy your reputation,” she said. Her voice was steady in the way it went steady when she had decided she was going to be steady regardless of what came at her. “Our actions destroyed it. The video only let everyone see clearly what we had already become.”

Josh Senior stared at her.

Josh moved between them.

“Dad.” He waited until his father looked at him. “You’re blaming the wrong thing.”

Josh Senior’s jaw tightened.

“The truth did not ruin us,” Josh said. “The lies did. If we hadn’t spent months on cameras making accusations we knew were false, there would not have been a lawsuit. There would not have been arrests. There would not have been a confession video for anyone to watch. Every consequence we are living through right now came from choices.” He looked at his father without looking away. “And the video was the first choice any of us has made in months that was actually right.”

Josh Senior shook his head.

Marie stood up.

Everyone looked at her.

She walked toward her husband with the walk of someone who had been sitting with something for long enough and had decided that sitting was finished. She stood in front of him and looked at his face and when she spoke her voice was tired in

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canc pecilit way et oman who had been tired for decades and had finally decided to say so.

“Stop,” she sandt

He looked at her.

“Stop blaming our children. Stop blaming the video. Stop blaming Alexander Kane and Lucia and Margaret.” She looked at him directly. “I chose to lie on camera. You chose to go along with every strategy we made. Claire chose to plan, Josh chose to follow.” She stopped. “We all chose this. Every single step. Nobody put a gun to any of our heads.”

Josh Senior opened his mouth.

“I am not finished,” Marie said.

He closed it.

“I spent fourty years standing beside you in this family and calling it loyalty,” she said. “I watched us treat Margaret the way we treated her and I told myself it was complicated and family was difficult and I let it continue. I watched us spend weeks attacking people who had never asked to be involved in our history and I made videos and I sat on sofas for cameras and I chose it.” Her voice did not break. “I am not going to stand in this living room and watch you blame our children for a reckoning that started long before either of them was old enough to make a decision.”

The room was silent.

Josh Senior stood in the center of it and looked at his wife and his daughter and his son and the framed photographs that had fallen onto the sofa during the earlier part of his movement around the room and his breathing was loud and unsteady.

Then he crossed to the side table and picked up a photograph and set it face–down without looking at it and picked up another and held it and looked at whatever was in it.

“Forty years,” he said again, quieter now. Not to the room. To the photograph.

“You can rebuild it,” Josh said. “Not all of it. Some things are gone and they’re not coming back. But you can rebuild something.” He looked at his father. “But not while you’re still running from the part you played in getting here.”

Josh Senior set the photograph down.

He looked at each of them in turn. His wife. His daughter. His son. Looking the way he had looked at things his entire life, assessing, calculating, searching for the angle that made a situation workable.

He appeared not to find it this time.

“I don’t recognize this family anymore,” he said.

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