Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 289

Chapter 289

Two days without word was long enough to change the quality of the house.

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It was in small things. The way Marie moved through the kitchen more slowly than usual, carrying the particular exhaustion that came from two nights of not sleeping properly rather than not sleeping at all. The phone on the counter that she picked up and put down again at intervals that had no logic to them except the logic of hoping. The uneaten food from the previous evening still in a container in the refrigerator because nobody had been hungry enough to finish it and nobody had bothered to throw it away.

Josh had been making calls since eight. He stood near the window with his phone while his coffee went cold on the counter and he went through the same list again, his father’s friends, the old office contacts, the club, the brother who had already said he did not know where Josh Senior had gone after leaving his house.

Marie sat at the table with her hands wrapped around a mug.

“I just want him to answer one call,” she said. Not to Josh specifically, not to anyone, just to the kitchen and whatever was listening. “One call. That’s all.”

Josh lowered the phone and looked at his mother. He had no answer that was not already known.

Claire had not touched the plate in front of her.

She was looking at the table in the way people looked at surfaces when they were actually looking at something much further away. Her breakfast had been cooling for twenty minutes. She had moved nothing on the plate.

“Mum,” she said.

Marie looked up.

Claire paused before she spoke, in the way she paused now before speaking, having learned something recently about the cost of words delivered without thought.

“I want to go and see Margaret today.”

The kitchen went quiet in a different way from the quiet it had been holding.

Marie stared at her daughter. Josh lowered his phone completely.

Marie asked with just her expression what her mouth had not yet found the words for.

up

and

“I’ve apologized to the Kanes on camera,” Claire said. She was looking at the table still, then she looked met her mother’s eyes. “I’ve apologized to everyone. Except the person I hurt the most.” She stopped. Her jaw was working. “I don’t know whether she’ll forgive me. I know she doesn’t have to.” She paused again. “But she deserves to hear me say it. To her face. Not on a video. Not through a lawyer. Just me, in a room, saying it to

her.”

Marie reached across the table and covered Claire’s hand with hers.

Josh looked at his sister.

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Chapter 289

“Then go,” he said.

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The prison visiting room had the same smell it always had, the industrial cleaner and the particular stillness of a space that absorbed whatever happened inside it without judgment or comment. Claire sat at the table and waited and her hands would not stay still. She pressed them flat on the surface and then moved them to her lap and then back to the surface. The woman at the desk had looked at her during the sign–in with the practiced neutrality of someone who had seen all the expressions visitors brought through that door.

She heard the door before she saw Margaret.

Margaret walked in wearing prison clothes, her posture different from the last time Claire had seen her in person, quieter in some way that was hard to name, less defended. She saw Claire and stopped.

The two of them looked at each other across the table.

Several seconds passed.

Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke. The visiting room went on around them, other tables and other voices, but in the specific radius around this one table there was nothing but the two women and the years between them and the particular weight of a silence that had been accumulating for longer than either of them wanted to think about.

Margaret sat down.

Claire stood up.

And then, before Margaret had fully processed the movement, Claire was not standing. She was on her knees on the floor of the visiting room with both hands gripping the edge of the table and her face completely open and broken, and the people at nearby tables turned and the officer near the door shifted his weight.

“Claire,” Margaret said.

“No,” Claire said. She was already crying, the real kind, not the kind she had directed at cameras, not the kind she deployed for effect, just the raw sound of someone who had been holding something back for a long time and had run out of the strength to hold it. “Don’t stop me. Please just let me.”

Margaret said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said. The words came out one at a time, between breaths, in the order they arrived. “I’m sorry for making you feel like you didn’t belong in your own family. For laughing when people compared us and feeling glad when they chose me. For treating you like a competition I had to win instead of a sister I was supposed to love.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand and kept going. “I’m sorry for never asking you how you were. Not properly. Not in all the years we shared a house and a table and a family, I never actually asked.”

Margaret’s hands were still on the table.

“I watched Dad treat you differently and I told myself you were difficult,” Claire said, “and the truth is I told myself that because it was easier than admitting I was glad. I was glad he favored me. I was glad I was the one he praised. And every time you tried and failed to earn something from him I felt better about myself, and that is the most shameful thing I have ever said out loud.” She pressed both hands over her face briefly and the you breathed. “I helped destroy your life. Not just David. Everything. I helped build the story that made

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problem in this family and I did it for years and I did it knowing exactly what I was doing.”

Margaret finally moved.

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She stood up and came around the table and crouched down beside her sister and put both hands on Claire

arms.

“Come and sit down,” she said quietly.

Claire let herself be guided back into the chair. Her face was wet and she was not trying to manage it

anymore.

Margaret sat across from her again and for a moment said nothing, letting Claire’s breathing settle toward something closer to steady.

Then she spoke.

“You were my little sister,” she said. Her voice was low and even. “Not in years, but in the way I thought about you. Younger than me meant I was supposed to look after you somehow. And instead I spent most of my life wondering what I had done wrong to make you treat me the way you did.” She paused. “I kept thinking if I tried harder. If I was quieter, better, more useful. If I just figured out the right way to be I would eventually become someone my sister actually loved.” She looked at Claire directly. “There were nights I cried about it. Alone, the way I cried about everything in that house, where nobody could hear and nobody would need to respond. Because I had learned not to expect anyone to respond.”

Claire’s face crumpled again.

“I couldn’t understand why my own sister hated me,” Margaret said. “Not because of anything I had done. Just because I existed and took up space and was occasionally in the room when you wanted to be the only one in it.”

The room held that for a moment.

Claire looked at her through the wreckage of it all. “How do you forgive someone for that?” she said. “How can you possibly forgive any of it?”

Margaret was quiet for a moment.

“Because carrying hatred uses up something I don’t have enough of left,” she said. Not dramatically. Just the plain truth of it, the way she had come to talk about things in this place, stripped of everything that was not response necessary. “I have spent years holding onto everything everyone did to me and everything I did in and all it has ever done is make me heavier.” She looked at her sister. “I am tired of being heavy.”

She reached across the table.

She put her hands over Claire’s hands.

“You’re my sister,” she said. “Whatever happened. Whatever we did to each other. That part of it doesn’t change.”

Claire pressed her lips together and exhaled and it sounded like something being released that had been held

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Chapter 289

for a long time.

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They held onto each other across the table, not quite a hug, not quite nothing, just the physical fact of two women who had hurt each other badly and were still, against all reasonable odds, in the same room choosing something different.

After a while Claire wiped her face and sat up straighter.

“Dad is gone,” she said.

Margaret looked at her.

“He left two days ago,” Claire said. “After everything. After the video and the argument. He got in his car and nobody has heard from him since.”

Margaret absorbed this.

“He went to Uncle Sam’s first,” Claire said, “and Sam turned him away. We’ve called everyone. His phone is switched off.”

Margaret looked at the table.

“I hope he comes home,” she said.

Claire watched her sister’s face. “Do you think he will?”

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