Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 299

Chapter 299

Alexander held Lucia’s hand through the automatic doors and across the emergency bay and past the desk where someone asked him his name and he answered without taking his eyes off Lucia, and when they brought the gurney he sat beside it and kept his hand in hers and she let him, which told him more about how she was feeling than anything she said.

“Alexander,” she said.

“I’m here.”

“You look worse than I do,” she said.

He tried to arrange his face into something that was not what it was. It did not work.

“That’s because you don’t understand what it was like watching you go down,” he said. He kept his voice low and steady and underneath the steadiness was something he was not going to examine in the middle of an emergency room with people moving around them. “You don’t understand what it looked like from where I was standing.”

She reached up and put her hand against the side of his face.

“I’m okay,” she said.

“Don’t do that.”

She looked at him.

“Don’t tell me you’re okay because you think it will make this easier,” he said. “Your pain is not smaller than everyone else’s. It has never been smaller. You have just spent years acting like it is.”

She went quiet.

The nurses arrived.

“Mr. Kane, we need to take her in for tests.”

He did not move immediately. He looked at Lucia on the gurney and her face looked back at him with the calm expression she brought to difficult things, the expression that had made her formidable in boardrooms and courtrooms and every place she had needed to be formidable, and he understood that she was using it now for him, not because she was not frightened, but because she knew he was.

“Go,” she said.

He did not move.

“Alexander.”

He took her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it and then let go.

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“I’ll be right here,” he said.

The doors closed between them.

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He stood on his side of them and looked at the closed doors for a long moment before he turned and found a chair and sat in it and immediately stood back up because sitting was not something he could do.

The waiting area had the quality all hospital waiting areas had, the specific institutional hum of a space designed for things that could not be rushed. He walked the length of it twice. He looked at the closed doors. He sat down and checked his phone and put it back in his pocket. He looked at the doors again.

His phone was ringing with calls he was not taking from numbers that were business and therefore irrelevant to any question that currently existed in his life. He answered only three calls, one from Ria, one from Lucas, and one that came in with a number he did not recognize and turned out to be the school calling about something that he handled in forty seconds and could not remember afterward.

Every time footsteps came from the direction of the emergency doors he looked up.

Every time it was not a doctor he looked back at the floor.

The hospital doors opened.

All four of them came through together, which told him that one of them had called the others before coming, or that they had all called each other simultaneously, or some combination that he did not have the capacity to trace right now because Monica had spotted him and was already crossing the waiting area with the specific urgency of a person who needed to be moving toward something.

He stood.

“Where is mom?” Monica said.

“Inside. Getting tests.” He pulled her into him before she could ask the next question and she let herself be held for a moment, her arms tight around him.

“Is she awake?” she said against his coat.

“Yes.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“She told me she was fine.”

Monica pulled back enough to look at him with her eyes full and a sound came out of her that was almost a laugh and was not.

“Of course she did,” she said. “She always says she’s fine.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked at the closed emergency doors.

The family arranged themselves in the waiting area in the configurations that families arrived at in hospitals, the specific groupings of people who have been handed a situation they cannot control and are working out

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how to be in proximity to each other without making it worse.

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Lucas had his phone in his hand and Alexander could see from where he sat that the screen had been checked multiple times in the span of minutes.

“Lucas,” he said.

His son looked up.

“You’ve checked the time several times.”

Lucas put the phone in his jacket pocket. He looked at the emergency doors.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said.

Nobody responded immediately, because it was the truest thing anyone in the room had said and they all recognized it as such.

“I can fix things,” Lucas said, more quietly. “I can throw money at problems and I can call lawyers and I can show up and do whatever needs doing. That’s what I know how to do.” He was still looking at the doors. “I can’t fix this.”

Ria was beside Monica with one arm around her. She had not said much since arriving. She was doing the thing she did when she was managing herself very carefully, the controlled stillness of someone who had decided to be the steady thing in the room.

“She’s strong,” Ria said.

Lucas looked at her.

“I know you don’t know that for certain,” Ria said, before he could say it. “I know.” She looked at the doors too. “I just need to say it.”

Lena had been quiet since sitting down. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the floor and something in her posture had the quality of a person turning something over internally that they had not yet found the words for.

“She didn’t have to love me,” Lena said.

The room turned toward her.

“She had reasons not to,” Lena said. “My father and her and everything that was complicated. She didn’t have to take me in and treat me the way she treated her own children.” Her voice went unsteady. “But she did. From the beginning she just did.”

Monica reached over and took her hand.

Lena held on..

The hour passed. It was more than an hour. The waiting area went through several complete cycles of its own rhythm, the staff changing shifts at one point, new people arriving for different reasons, a child crying

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somewhere behind a curtain and being quieted. The Kane family sat through all of it without dispersing.

Monica had been watching the doors since she arrived.

She had been holding herself together with the kind of effort that was visible in the set of her shoulders and the way she was breathing slightly more carefully than usual, the effort of someone who has been doing this for long enough to be good at it but is reaching the edge of how long they can keep doing it.

She turned toward Alexander.

“Dad,” she said.

He moved immediately. He turned toward her and saw her face doing the thing he had been watching it not do for the past hour.

She tried to say something and could not. Her throat moved. She shook her head.

Then: “I can’t lose her.”

He pulled her in.

She pressed her face against his chest and the crying came, the real kind, the kind that had more than just today in it, all the months of fear and loss and the specific grief of a girl who had already sat beside someone she loved and held their hand while they died.

“I can’t lose another parent,” she said.

He held her without saying anything for a moment.

Then he pulled back and put both hands on either side of her face.

“Look at me,” he said.

She looked up at him.

“I cannot tell you what tomorrow holds,” he said. “I will not lie to you by pretending otherwise.” He kept her face in his hands. “But I know your mother. I know what she has already survived. I know how much she loves you. And I know that woman in that room will not stop fighting as long as you are on this side of those doors.”

Monica’s face crumpled.

“She loves you too much,” he said simply.

She cried harder.

He held her.

Ria came and sat beside him after Monica had gone to the bathroom to wash her face. She was quiet for a

moment.

“You’re scared,” she said.

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He did not deny it.

“I am.” he said.

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She looked at him. She rarely saw this from him. He understood that. He had built a version of himself over decades that managed fear the way it managed other difficult things, by moving faster than it, by solving around it, by converting it into action. There was no action available here.

“I spent years believing I could control enough of the variables to keep this family safe,” he said. He looked at the closed doors. “Business problems. People coming after us. Situations that required resources and decisions. Those I can face.” He paused. “Not this.”

Ria sat with him.

“Mum would tell you to stop blaming yourself,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“She’d also tell you she’s fine.”

“She already did.”

“And you didn’t believe her then either.”

He almost smiled.

The emergency room doors opened.

Every person in the waiting area stood before the movement had fully registered. The doctor who came through was a woman in her fifties with a folder under her arm and the expression of someone who has carried results of all varieties across rooms like this one and knows the weight of what she is holding.

Alexander stepped forward.

“Doctor,” he said.

She stopped in front of him and looked at the family assembled behind him, at the four children, at the tight arrangement of people who had been sitting here for hours.

“I have the results,” she said.

Nobody breathed.

She opened the folder.

She looked at Alexander.

“There are things we need to discuss,” she said.

The waiting room was completely silent.

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Alexander kept his eyes on the doctor’s face and behind him the four children stood together and nobody moved and the woman who had held this family together through everything was on the other side of a set of doors and the answer to what was happening to her was about to be said aloud.

For the first time, the Kane family was waiting for someone else to tell them whether their world would remain the same.

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