Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 298

15:03 Mon, Jul 13

Chapter 298

Chapter 298

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The birthday decorations had not been fully cleared away.

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A few balloons still clung to the backs of the dining room chairs, slightly deflated now in the way of balloons on the morning after, the rose gold color still bright but the urgency gone out of them. Monica was wearing the bracelet from Ria. Lena had her phone out and was showing Lucas something on the screen with the specific energy of someone who has been waiting all morning for the right moment to produce evidence.

“You drew a circle and called it a whale,” Lena said.

“It was a stylized whale,” Lucas said.

“The ten–year–old drew a whale with individual teeth.”

“He was a prodigy. It would have been wrong of me to compete seriously with a child prodigy.”

Monica looked at him over her orange juice. “You were absolutely competing seriously.”

“I was going easy on him.”

Ria set down her toast without looking up. “You were going so easy that you finished fourth out of four.”

The table laughed and Lucas pointed at each of them in turn with the expression of a man who was going to document this injustice for future reference, and Lena took a screenshot of whatever was on her phone and Lucas reached for it and missed and she held it out of range.

Lucia sat beside Alexander and watched all of it.

She had been watching them for several minutes, the way she watched them when they did not know she was watching, the specific way of paying attention that tried to hold a moment without the holding making it self- conscious. Ria and Lucas arguing with the comfortable ease of siblings who had been arguing the same way for years. Lena fully integrated, already teasing Lucas with the confidence of someone who knew she was allowed to. Monica laughing at the table with the bracelet on her wrist and the album from Lena somewhere upstairs.

This was the morning after the best birthday her daughter had ever had, in a year that had held some of the worst days any of them had been through.

She thought about that arithmetic.

Alexander turned toward her. “What are you thinking about?”

She looked at him and then back at the table.

“That yesterday was perfect,” she said.

He waited.

“Not because of the event or the guests or any of the formal parts of it,” she said. “Just because everyone was

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happy at the same time. I don’t think I have seen everyone happy at the same time in a very long while.”

Alexander reached under the table and took her hand.

She held onto it.

“We should go somewhere,” she said, to the table now rather than to Alexander. “All of us. Away. No company business, no hearings, no strategy, no anything that involves lawyers or phone calls or solving a problem. Just away.”

Monica looked up with the specific alertness of someone who has heard exactly the right thing.

“Away where?” Lucas asked.

“Anywhere that isn’t here,” Lucia said. “Somewhere warm. Somewhere nobody needs anything from any of us for ten days.”

Lucas immediately became more interested. “When you say a Kane family trip, are we talking the kind where Dad has a scheduled itinerary for every forty–five minutes?”

Alexander looked at him. “I do not do that.”

Everyone looked at him.

Ria put her fork down. “You made a laminated timetable for a family picnic.”

“That picnic ran very efficiently,” Alexander said.

“Dad,” Lena said gently, “a picnic is not supposed to run efficiently.”

The laughter at the table was easy and complete and Lucia watched it and thought about all the mornings in the past year that had not been easy or complete, the mornings of lawsuits and press conferences and children coming home from school carrying the weight of what had been said about their family.

She stood up to take her plate to the kitchen.

The feeling arrived without warning.

Not pain exactly. Something that rose in her throat and changed the temperature of the room and made her stop moving. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, and walked quickly toward the hallway.

Alexander was already on his feet before anyone else had processed what was happening.

He found her in the nearest bathroom, kneeling on the tile floor, and he crouched down beside her without asking and held her hair back and put his other hand on her back and said nothing because what was needed right now was not words.

When it was over she sat back against the vanity cabinet and he handed her the glass from the edge of the sink.

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“I’m fine,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“It’s probably something I ate.”

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“You barely ate anything at the party,” he said. “You were talking to guests all evening.”

She looked at the glass of water.

He said nothing for a moment.

Then: “How long has this been happening?”

She did not look at him.

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He watched her not look at him and understood more from that than from anything she could have said.

“Lucia.”

She exhaled slowly. “Occasionally. Not every day.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

She looked at the wall. “Because everyone was happy,” she said. “Monica’s birthday was coming. The family had finally found some peace. I didn’t want to put something else into the middle of that.”

He was quiet for a long time.

“You are not something that ruins our happiness,” he said. “You are our happiness. Whatever is happening with you matters more than any of it.”

She looked at him.

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His face was controlled the way it went controlled when he was managing something that had frightened him.

They went back to the dining room.

The family saw her face before either of them said a word.

Monica stood.

“Mum,” she said. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine, sweetheart.”

Nobody believed this. The table could read Lucia the way families read the person who had been holding everything together for long enough that any crack in the surface was visible immediately.

Ria watched her with the expression she used when she was cataloguing something and deciding what to do about it. Lena had put her phone down. Lucas was looking at his mother in the way he looked at things he was

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trying to understand but did not have enough information for yet.

“You don’t look fine,” Ria said.

“Maybe you should see someone,” Lena said.

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Monica came around the table and stood beside her mother and looked up at her with the expression that was no longer entirely the expression of a child who needed protecting.

“Please don’t tell us you’re okay when you’re not,” Monica said. “We can handle it. Whatever it is.”

Lucia looked at her daughter and registered something she had not registered before, or had registered slowly over months without naming it. Monica was fourteen now. She had survived things that would have dismantled most adults, and she was standing here asking to share the weight rather than be shielded from it.

“I’ll see someone if it continues,” Lucia said.

“Promise?” Monica said.

“I promise.”

But she already knew she had been putting it off for longer than she was admitting.

She went to the office.

Alexander drove her, and when she said she did not need him to come up he stood outside the car and watched her walk through the entrance of Hart Industries with an expression she had not seen on him in a very long time, the expression of a man calculating risk.

“You are the most stubborn person I have ever argued with,” he said, before she went.

“You married me knowing that,” she said.

“I did. I just assumed I would eventually win an argument.”

She smiled and went upstairs.

The boardroom was full. The quarterly review, the charity foundation expansion, the upcoming partnership discussions. Her team was already arranged around the table and they all straightened slightly when she came in, the automatic response to her presence in a room that she had built through years of being the person who knew exactly what she was doing and made it visible.

She sat down.

She ran the first part of the meeting with the specific efficiency that had rebuilt Hart Industries into something more than it had been when she found it. Numbers and projections and the clarity she had always brought to complicated problems.

Forty minutes in, her vision went strange.

Not dark. Not sudden. Just a quality to the light in the room that had not been there before, a slight

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imprecision at the edges, the shapes of the people across the table not quite as sharp.

She gripped the edge of the table.

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Her assistant, a woman who had been watching her more carefully than usual all morning, stood slightly.

Lucia looked at her and said “continue” and the meeting continued.

But the room had started to tilt.

She put her other hand flat on the table and pressed down and breathed through it and told herself it was the same thing it had been at breakfast, the same brief something that would pass if she gave it a moment, and she had given it a moment now and it was not passing.

She tried to stand.

Her assistant was around the table before Lucia’s legs had made the decision fully, catching her by the arm, and Lucia’s other hand found the back of the chair and she held it and the room was moving and there were voices but they were coming from slightly the wrong distance.

“Mrs. Kane.”

“Get someone,” another voice said.

“Mrs. Kane, can you hear me?”

She heard all of it. She understood all of it. She simply could not make her body cooperate with what she was hearing.

The floor came toward her and someone’s arm was around her and she was going down anyway, slowly, the boardroom of the company she had built going sideways around her, and above the sound of the chairs and the voices she could hear one clear instruction.

“Call Mr. Kane.”

In his office across the city, Alexander’s phone lit up with a name he had not expected.

He answered immediately.

The voice on the other end was his wife’s assistant, and the specific quality of a breath taken before saying something was already telling him before the words arrived.

“Mr. Kane. Something happened to Mrs. Kane.”

He was already standing.

The phone was already in his coat pocket.

He was already moving.

Because Alexander Kane had faced legal threats and public scandals and enemies with resources and people

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who had spent years trying to take things from him, and he had moved through all of it with the specific composure of a man who knew how to hold himself together when the world pushed back.

But the thought of Lucia on a boardroom floor with her name coming out of someone else’s voice was not a thing he knew how to be composed about.

For the first time in years, Alexander Kane was afraid.

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