Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 292

Chapter 292

The idea started with Ria, the way most things did.

98

55 vouchers

She came downstairs on the morning of Marco’s birthday with her coat already on and her keys in her hand, and she stood in the kitchen doorway and said to Lucas and Monica: “We should go and see him today.”

They had both understood immediately. Neither of them asked who she meant.

Lucas looked at his coffee cup. Monica looked at Ria. Then Monica nodded.

“Yes,” she said.

Lucas put his cup down. “Give me five minutes.”

They were gathering their things when Lena appeared at the top of the stairs.

“I’m coming,” she said.

All three of them looked up at her.

“You’re my siblings,” she said simply, looking back down at them with the specific calm certainty of someone who has already decided and is not interested in discussing whether they’re correct. “You’re not going without me.”

Nobody argued.

Alexander and Lucia were in the study when Ria put her head around the door.

“We’re going to visit Dad’s grave,” she said. “It’s his birthday today.”

Alexander looked at Lucia. The look between them took less than a second and contained everything it needed to.

“We’ll come with you,” Lucia said.

Ria’s expression shifted slightly, the question behind it visible before she spoke it. “You don’t have to. This is for us.”

“We know,” Alexander said. He was already standing. “We want to come.”

Ria looked at them both for a moment. Then she nodded once.

They stopped on the way. Monica had been the one to ask them to pull over at the florist near the cemetery, and she had gone inside and come back with a wrapped bunch of white lilies and a small bunch of whatever had been in the front display that she had simply pointed at and said those as well, and she carried both carefully back to the car and held them in her lap for the rest of the drive without explaining herself.

Lucas had stopped separately at the off–licence on the corner without telling anyone why and come back with a bottle of whiskey and put it on the seat beside him and said nothing about it.

1/5

10:43 Fri, Jul 10

Chapter 292

98

255 vouchers

They drove in two cars because there were six of them. The day was cold and grey in the specific way of late autumn, the kind of grey that turned the world’s colors down without quite threatening rain.

The cemetery had the quality that cemeteries always had in daylight, more ordinary than the mind expected, people moving along the paths, a groundskeeper somewhere beyond the far hedgerow. The section where Marco was buried was near the east wall, under a tree that had been shedding for the past two weeks and had left a thin layering of leaves on and around the stone.

Ria cleared them away with her hand, kneeling, brushing the stone with her palm until the name was fully visible.

She stood.

Monica came forward and placed the white lilies at the base of the headstone, arranging them with a small amount of care, the other bunch beside them. She stepped back.

Lucas crouched and set the whiskey bottle against the stone’s base, the label facing outward. He looked at it for a second when he stood.

“He would have said it was a waste of a good bottle,” Lucas said quietly.

Monica made a sound that was not quite a laugh.

They stood in a loose group, not quite touching, looking at the stone with Marco’s name on it and the dates and the brief words beneath, the simple precision of what was left to indicate an entire complicated person.

“Happy birthday, Dad,” Ria said. Her voice was steady, the specific steadiness of someone who had decided how they were going to do this and was doing it. “We brought everyone.”

Monica began speaking to him next, not to the group but to the stone, in the direct conversational tone she had arrived at for impossible situations.

She told him about the Lowe family and the videos and the lies they had told about the family on camera. She told him about the schoolyard and her arm. She told him about the court hearing and the truth video and sitting at the dinner table watching the Lowe family finally say what was real. She told him about the letter she had written to Margaret and what she had decided when she sent it, and she said she thought he would have understood that decision.

Lucas stood with his hands in his coat pockets when it was his turn.

“I’ve been angry,” he said, his voice carrying the particular roughness that came from holding something carefully. “For months. You probably would have told me that was the wrong approach. Or maybe not, knowing you.” He paused. “I talked to Dad Alexander. It helped. I’m still not done with it but I’m working on it.” He looked at the stone. “We’re all working on it. I think that’s what you would have wanted.”

Ria crouched back down so that she was at the level of the stone rather than above it, her coat spreading on the damp grass.

“I miss you,” she said. Just those three words. She said them the way you said things to someone who could not answer, plainly, without decoration, because decoration would have been a way of putting distance between herself and the truth of them. “Every day I think of something I want to tell you and then I remember. It keeps catching me off guard.” She paused. “But we’re alright. I want you to know that. We’re

2/5

10:43 Fri, Jul 10

Chapter 292

“I forgive you,” she said.

98

EX 55 vouchers

The words came out more easily than she had expected. She had thought about this for months, the words she would say if she ever said them, and she had imagined they would need effort. They did not. She had already done the work of arriving at them. This was only the moment she said them to his name.

“For the marriage,” she said. “For what you brought into it when you brought Margaret. For the things that went wrong between us that I held onto too long without saying what was true.” She paused. “For all of it. I forgive you, Marco.”

She looked at the lilies Monica had placed there.

“I’ve wondered a thousand times,” she said, her voice quieter now, “whether my revenge pushed Margaret further than I ever intended. I never wanted any of this to end with you dying. I never wanted any of it to end with a basement.” She stopped. The wind moved through the bare tree once. “I’ll always carry that question with me. But I want you to know that I never wanted it.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I am also not going to apologize for fighting for our children,” she said. “For protecting what I built. For refusing to disappear quietly. That part I do not regret.” She looked at the stone. “I think you know the difference.”

She said the last thing.

“I am going to keep being a good mother to our children,” she said. “I already am. But I am going to keep being it. Every day, for as long as they need me, and then past that because that is what mothers do.” She looked at the stone one more time. “You did something right with them. We did something right with them. Whatever else was wrong between us, we got that part right.”

She stood in the cold for another minute, not speaking.

Then she walked back along the path toward the gate where the cars were waiting, where Alexander was standing outside his car watching her come, where the four children were visible through the windows talking about something she could not hear.

She reached him.

He

put his arm around her without speaking and she leaned against him and together they looked back once at the tree by the east wall and the stone beneath it, the white lilies bright against the grey of the day, the whiskey bottle catching a small amount of the fading afternoon light,

Then they got in the car.

As Alexander started the engine, Monica looked back through the rear window until the grave disappeared behind the trees. None of them spoke. There was nothing left that needed saying.

The cemetery behind them held its quiet. The tree above the grave dropped one more leaf. It settled on the stone without ceremony, the way leaves always did, without asking anything of anyone.

4/5

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify