Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 286

Chapter 286

Sunday morning in the Kane house had a particular quality that weekday mornings did not.

Something slower about it. The coffee made without anyone watching the clock. The pancakes that Lucia insisted on making herself on Sundays for reasons nobody had ever analyzed because the result was too good to question. The table laid with the morning light coming through the windows at the angle that meant it was the right side of nine o’clock.

Lucas was explaining to Ria, at some length, why the sust she had described was unacceptable on every level she might care

name. Ria was listening with the patient expression of someone who had already decided and was waiting for the planation to finish so she could confirm this. Lena was reading something on her phone and eating without looking at her te with the practiced coordination of a person who had been doing both things simultaneously for years. Alexander had e newspaper folded in the way he folded it on Sundays, the sections separated and arranged in the order he worked hrough them, unhurried.

Lucia watched Monica.

Monica was at the table. She was present in the physical sense, she had a plate and a fork and a cup of coffee in front of her, but she had the quality of someone whose attention had never fully arrived. She was somewhere else behind her eyes. Lucia had been noticing this since Monica can the stairs and had not said anything because Monica would say it when she was ready.

Monica

put

her fork down.

The small sound of it agai

from her phone.

“There’s something

Alexander

“What

ugh to shift the atmosphere. Lucas stopped mid–sentence. Lena looked up

e, Monica said.

then at her family. “Last night, after everyone went to bed, I went back to my room and I

before Monica said it.

couldn’t stop thinking about it. I barely slept.” She looked at her hands. “I’ve decided I want to send it.”

ed this.

en lifting his coffee cup when Monica started speaking. The cup was still in the air.

nt to carry it anymore,” Monica said. “The hatred. I’ve been holding it since the trial and I told myself it was the

g to feel and that it was keeping me safe somehow, like if I stayed angry enough nothing else could hurt me.” She p. “I kept thinking hating her wa

t have wanted me spending

reached forward and

et his coffee cup

tually go

Dad. But I don’t think that’s what he would have wanted. He deed our father Im sair

“No.” He looked around the table. I want to understand this. I’m genuinely trying to understand this.” He looked at Monica. “You sat across from Josh Lose and forgave hith. You wrote a letter to Margaret and now you want to send it. And I’m sitting here and I cannot get there I cannot reach the place where any of that makes sense.”

Monica kept her voice steady. I’m not pretending she didn’t hurt us. I’m not pretending what she did was acceptable or that she deserves in receive forgivenews from me. I’m forgiving her because I deserve peace. That’s the only reason. It’s for me.”

Laras looked at the table.

Then he looked up.

Something had shifted in his face. The specific flatness of held–down feeling giving way to something that had been underneath it for much longer.

“Dad finally changed,” he said. His voice was different now. Quieter, cracked in a new place. “He had been stuck in the same bad version of himself for so long. And then something in him shifted. He apologized. He meant it. For the first time in months I thought we were actually going to get somewhere. He stopped. His jaw was working around words that were difficult. “He wanted to fix things. He was trying. And before any of it could go anywhere.” He pressed his lips together. “She took him.”

Nobody spoke.

Lucas looked at Monica,

“She didn’t just take our father,” he said. His voice had lost the flatness entirely. It was just raw now, just the real thing under everything. “She took every birthday he was ever going to have. Every Christmas. Every ordinary Sunday morning. Every phone call I was going to make him when something good happened. Every time I was going to want to tell him something and reach for the phone. He stopped again. “And you want to forgive her for all of that.”

Monica stood.

She walked around the table to where her brother was sitting. She stood beside him.

“I miss him every single day,” she said. “Not one day goes by that I don’t think about him. Not one. I still reach for things I want to tell him and then remember.” Her voice was unsteady but it did not stop. “You are right that she took those things from us. She did. Nothing anyone says changes that.” She looked at her brother’s profile, at the way he was holding himself together with pure will. “But hating Margaret has not brought him back. It has not given me a single minute more with him. All it has done is keep me living in the worst moment of my life instead of moving past it.” She touched his arm. “I am not asking you to forgive her. I would never ask you to feel something you don’t feel. I’m only asking you to understand why I need to do this for myself”

Lucas looked at her hand on his arm.

Then he looked away,

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