Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 287

09:05 Thu, Jul 9 Giá

Chapter 287

Chapter 287

Lucia had been standing at the window for ten minutes before Alexander came back upstairs.

She was not looking at the garden in any active sense. Her eyes were pointed in that direction but the garden was not what she was seeing. She was somewhere else, in the kitchen half an hour ago, watching her son’s face when Monica/announded she was sending the letter, watching the specific quality of pain that moved through Lucas before it hardened into something he could carry more easily.

Alexander came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.

She turned slightly and the look on her face told him everything before she said anything.

“You’ve been standing here for ten minutes,” he said.

She managed the shape of a smile. It did not reach her eyes. “I’m worried about Lucas.”

He did not say it will be fine or he’ll be alright. He simply waited, which was what she needed, and she kept going.

“Did you see his face?” she said. “When Monica said she was sending the letter.” She turned more fully toward him. Her eyes were wet. “There was so much in it. Anger and grief and something that looked like betrayal, like the ground had shifted under him in a room where everyone else stayed standing.” She pressed her fingers against her mouth for a moment. “I keep thinking I’ve failed him somehow. That he’s growing up with all of this inside him and I haven’t found the right thing to say.”

Alexander shook his head.

“Lucas is not becoming a hateful person,” he said.

She looked at him.

“He’s becoming a grieving son,” he said. “Those are two different things.”

She sat on the edge of the bed and he sat beside her and neither of them spoke for a moment.

“Grief wears a lot of faces,” Alexander said. “Some people go quiet. Some people cry until they run out of it. Some people get angry because anger is a harder thing to fall apart inside. It feels more solid. It feels like you’re still standing.” He looked at. her. “Lucas is angry because he loved his father and his father is gone and there is no angle on that which doesn’t hurt. The anger is the grief. They’re the same thing.”

“What if it stays that way?” Lucia said. “What if he carries it for years and it becomes who he is? What if he becomes someone who can’t let anything go, who holds everything tight until he breaks something?”

Alexander looked at her steadily.

“The Lucas we are raising,” he said, “is respectful. He shows up for his sisters. He goes into coaches’ offices and tells them the truth about himself when it’s hard to do so. He sat at a dinner table two weeks ago and made a case for consequences that were fair instead of just severe.” He paused. “One Sunday morning does not undo who he is.”

Lucia leaned her head against his should?

“I’ll talk to him,” Alexander said.

She looked up.

“Not to push him somewhere he isn’t ready to go,” he said. “Just to sit with him.”

He stood up,

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Chapter 287

He went upstairs.

Outside Lucas’s room he paused. The door was closed in the specific way that meant it had been closed on purpose, not just pulled to. He knocked quietly.

“Come in,” Lucas said from inside.

Alexander opened the door.

Lucas was at his desk. He had his chair turned slightly toward the window and his arms rested on the desk in front of him, not working on anything, just occupying the position. He looked the way people looked after a significant amount of emotional expenditure, the specific hollowed tiredness of it.

When he saw Alexander he straightened slightly.

“Dad.” Something in his expression moved between surprise and something less readable. “Am I in trouble?”

“No.” Alexander said. He looked around the room briefly. “Am I interrupting?”

Lucas shook his head.

Alexander crossed the room and sat in the chair near the desk, the one that existed for exactly this purpose without anyone having consciously put it there. He settled into it without ceremony.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

The room held the particular Sunday afternoon quiet of a house that had been through something in the morning and was still processing it.

“Your mother is worried,” Alexander said finally.

Lucas exhaled. “I know.”

“She’s not worried about what you said,” Alexander continued. “She’s worried about what you’re carrying.”

Lucas looked at the desk.

“Tell me about it,” Alexander said.

It was not a question exactly. Not a command. Just an opening.

Lucas was quiet for several seconds.

“Every time I think it’s getting easier,” he said, “something brings it back, Not big things. Little things. His chair in a room. The way he used to mispronounce one specific word and never corrected it even when we pointed it out. His birthday coming up.” He pressed his palms flat on the desk. “I’ll be in the middle of something completely ordinary and I’ll think I want to tell him about this and then I remember.” He looked up. “And every time I remember there’s this moment where it s fresh again. Like the first time.”

Alexander nodded.

“And then I think about her,” Lucas said. “And the anger comes back. Because she’s the reason that moment exists. Every single one of those moments where I reach for something that isn’t there anymore, she’s the reason for it.”

He turned to look at Alexander.

“How am I supposed to forgive that?” he said.

“I’m not asking you to Alexander said.

Chapter 287

Lucas blinked.

Alexander waited a moment to let that land. “I mean it. I’m not here to convince you to forgive Margaret. That is not wha this conversation is.”

Something in Lucas’s posture released, very slightly.

“But I want to tell you something about anger,” Alexander said. “Forgiveness is a choice. A hard one, and nobody is entitled demand it from you. But anger is something different. Anger is a place you can start living in without meaning to.” He looked at his son. “Right now Margaret is in a prison cell. She is going to be there for the rest of her life. She is not going to have the life she had or the people she had or the freedom she had. That is real. That is the consequence.” He paused. “Bu you replay what she did every day, if you let it live in you and take up space in you and become the loudest thing inside yo you build something alongside her prison. Just made of different material.”

Lucas looked at the window.

“Your father wasn’t a perfect man,” Alexander said, his voice shifting into something quieter. “Marco had sharp edges and made decisions I disagreed with and there are things between us that I never fully resolved before he was gone.” He stopped “But he loved his family. He loved you and your sisters more than most people get to be loved by a father.” He looked at Lucas. “If he could see you right now, sitting at this desk with all of this inside you, do you think he’d want that for you?”

Lucas said it immediately, not as a considered answer but as the obvious truth. “No.”

“Neither do I,” Alexander said.

The room was quiet.

Then Lucas’s face did something that had been threatening to happen since before he left the table that morning. His jaw moved. He pressed his lips together. He looked at the window and then he looked at the desk and the composure he had been maintaining with the specific effort of someone who had decided not to cry in public gave way.

“It’s not fair,” he said. His voice had gone to almost nothing.

“No,” Alexander said. “It isn’t.”

“He changed.” Lucas was not looking at anything now, just somewhere in the middle distance where the grief lived. “He was actually trying. He apologized to Monica. He was different.” He stopped. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “We finally had something that felt like a real chance. And then before it could go anywhere…”

He did not finish.

Alexander moved his chair closer and put his hand on his son’s shoulder and left it there. He did not speak. He did not try to find the words that would make this smaller or more manageable or easier to hold, because there were no words like that and he knew it and Lucas would have known it too.

They sat together for a while.

Just that.

Eventually Lucas straightened. He breathed in steadily, the specific controlled breath of someone coming back from somewhere.

“Will it always feel this bad?” he asked.

Alexander thought about this

honestly, the way a real answer required.

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