Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 283

Chapter 283

The front door had been closed for almost twenty minutes.

The room still held the shape of everything that had happened in it. Jost, Senior’s coffee mug sat untourter table, the surface of it cooled and forgotten. His newspaper was on the armchair with the page still o

not been reading before any of this started. One of the framed photographs had fallen onto the wis during the per he had stopped being able to contain himself, and it was still there, face–up, the four of them from some holiday and nobody had reached over to stand it upright.

Nobody had spoken since the door closed.

Marie sat on the sofa with her hands in her lap and her eyes somewhere that was not the room. Joth stood near th in the position he had taken when the car disappeared and had not moved from since. Caire was near the replace arms folded around herself, the specific posture of someone who was cold in a room that was not cold.

The silence had a different quality from the silence that came before arguments. That silence was full of things gathering This silence was what remained after something had broken and the pieces were still on the floor

Claire’s voice came out barely above a breath.

“Mum.”

Marie looked at her daughter.

“Did we do the right thing?” Claire said.

Her voice was not asking for reassurance. She was genuinely asking.

“He looked so broken,” she said. “I’ve never seen him like that. Not once. In my whole life.” She pressed her lips together. “What if we pushed him past something he can come back from?”

Marie stood up.

She crossed the room and took Claire’s hands in hers and held them the way she had when Claire was small and frightened by something she did not have the words for yet.

“Look at me,” Marie said.

Claire did.

“Yes,” Marie said. “We did the right thing.”

Claire lowered her eyes.

“Telling the truth is never the wrong choice,” Marie said. “Not when it’s about something real. Not when it’s about people who have been hurt by the silence of it.” She kept hold of Claire’s hands. “Your father has spent years building a version of events that puts everyone else at fault. Someone had to stop living inside that version.”

“But he lost everything,” Claire said quietly.

“He lost those things because of choices made over months and years,” Marie said. “Not because we finally said the truth out loud.” She looked at her daughter. “And you are not responsible for his pain. I need you to understand that. His pain is real and I feel it too, but it belongs to him. He has to face it himself.”

Claire’s face crumpled and she let herself be held, and Marie held her the way she wished she had held Margaret more

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Chapter 284

it condition, without agenda, just the weight of someone in her arms.

Josh came over quietly and put his hand on Claire’s shoulder.

“He’ll come around,” he said.

Claire looked at him with the question she did not fully want to ask.

“And if he doesn’t,” Josh said, meeting it directly, “we keep loving him anyway. But loving someone doesn’t mean helping them stay hidden from the things they’ve done.” He looked at his mother. “We’ve been doing that long enough.”

Marie nodded.

Josh’s phone vibrated.

He looked at the screen and his face changed.

Uncle Sam.

Marie and Claire both turned.

He answered and immediately put it on speaker without being asked because the room needed to hear whatever this was.

“Josh.” Sam’s voice came through clearly. “Has your father come home?”

Josh looked at the window. “No. He hasn’t.”

A silence from Sam’s end, the specific silence of someone confirming what they already suspected.

“He came here,” Sam said.

Claire put her hand over her mouth.

“He came to your house?” Josh said.

“About two hours ago,” Sam said. “He wanted to stay. He said all of you had turned against him. That you’d betrayed him and destroyed everything he’d spent his life building.”

Nobody in the room said anything.

Sam exhaled. “I told him the truth. I told him none of you betrayed him. You stopped lying.” A pause. “He didn’t want to hear

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it.”

“Did he say where he was going?” Marie asked.

“No,” Sam said. “He left angry. I’m sorry, Marie. I couldn’t let him stay. Not with my children in the house.”

The room held that for a moment.

Then Sam said, “Josh. Claire.” His voice had shifted into something warmer. “Tell your mother this too.”

Marie moved closer to the phone.

“I’m proud of all three of you,” Sam said. “I mean that. Standing up and saying the things you said on camera, about your own family, when it cost you something real to say them. That takes something most people don’t have.” His voice was steady and plain with it. “I know it wasn’t easy. None of it was easy. But you did it.”

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sad that was not quite a word

Jush looked at the ceiling for a moment “Thank you, Uncle

“The more thing.” Sam said, and his time shifted again, back to something more careful. “Your father is in pain, Real pain. Beneath all the anger, something is cracking open in him. He’s beginning to remember things he’s been pushing away for a very long time.” A pause. “Don’t give up on him. But don’t go back to protecting him from hitself either. He needs to face this. Let him face it

“We will” Josh said.

The call ended.

”

2002

Marie picked up her phone before the silence had fully settled back over the room. She dialed.

It rang four times and went to voicemail. She stood and listened to his voice on the recording, the everyday businesslike voice he used for his phone, so familiar and so absent, and she pressed End without leaving a message and immediately dialed again.

Voicemail again.

Claire tried. The same.

Josh tried. The same.

“He might be driving,” Claire said.

“Maybe,” Josh said.

Neither of them said what they both knew, which was that Josh Senior drove one–handed and answered the phone with the other for any call worth answering, that he had always done this and they had always told him not to and he had always ignored the instruction, and if he was not answering it was not because he was driving.

The evening moved in the way evenings moved when nobody was paying attention to anything except the one thing they were waiting for. Six o’clock became seven without anyone eating. The food that Marie had started before any of this became something else, a pot on the stove that nobody was going to touch. Seven became eight and the room grew darker and someone turned on one lamp and the house felt enormous around the three of them.

Marie called again at half past eight.

Voicemail.

Josh at quarter to nine.

Voicemail.

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