Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 300

Chapter 300

The room had been holding its breath for hours.

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Dr. Carter looked at the family in front of her, at the man who had taken one step forward and stopped, at the four people behind him holding onto each other the way people brace themselves for news they cannot control.

“Mr. Kane,” she said. “I know this has been a frightening day for your family.”

Alexander’s jaw moved. “Doctor. Please. Just tell me what’s happening with my wife.”

She glanced at the folder, then back at him.

“Your wife is stable,” she said.

Monica covered her mouth with both hands. Lucas closed his eyes. Ria gripped Lena’s hand so tightly Lena felt it in her fingers. Alexander’s shoulders dropped with the breath he’d been holding for almost an hour.

But he didn’t fully relax.

“Stable because,” he said.

Dr. Carter looked at him the way someone looks at a man who needs to hear the rest before he can rest.

“Because she is pregnant,” she said.

The waiting room went completely silent. Not the anxious silence from before. A different one, the kind that comes when a brain needs an extra second to catch up to news it wasn’t expecting.

Alexander stared at her. “Excuse me.” Not a question. More like asking the room to confirm he hadn’t misheard.

“Mrs Lucia Kane is four weeks pregnant,” Dr. Carter said. “The symptoms she’s had match early pregnancy. The collapse today came from low blood pressure, made worse by exhaustion and not eating enough. She isn’t in danger. The pregnancy is healthy.”

Monica made a sound before the doctor had even finished. “My mother.” She stared at her, rebuilding everything she’d been bracing for. “My mother is having a baby.”

“Yes,” Dr. Carter said.

The fear that had filled the room dissolved all at once.

Monica turned to Alexander. “We’re not losing her.”

Something in his face broke open, quietly and completely, the composure he had held through every crisis of the past year, through courtrooms and boardrooms and press conferences and now this hospital corridor. He closed his eyes and let out a breath that felt like it had been sitting in his chest since the phone call in his office.

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Chapter 300

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Dr. Carter gave him a moment, then offered to take him in.

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Lucia’s room was big and plain. She was sitting up in bed when the door opened, her color better than it had been at the office but still not quite herself, and she read his face the second she saw it, the way she always read his face.

“Alexander?” she said.

He crossed the room and sat down beside the bed and took her hand, but the words didn’t come right away. The last hour still needed sorting before he could put any of it into sentences.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

“Because I stood outside those doors,” he said, “and I let myself imagine my life without you in it.” His voice came out rough, the sound of a man who had kept something sealed shut for hours and was finally letting it out. “I’ve built things. I’ve lost things and rebuilt them. I’ve stood across from people who wanted to take everything I had. None of it ever frightened me the way those two hours did.”

She watched his face.

“Then she told me,” he said, and something moved through him that was grief and relief traveling the same road at once. “She told me you weren’t going anywhere.”

Lucia looked at him. Understanding arrived a second before the words did, her hand moving to her stomach on its own.

“The baby,” she said.

He laid his hand gently over hers, over the place where something had been growing for four weeks while the rest of them planned birthdays and sat in hospital rooms and waited out the last stretch of a lawsuit.

“Our baby,” he said, very quietly.

Lucia touched his face and found it wet and said nothing about it, because nothing needed saying.

“I have faced enemies,” he said, not looking away from her. “None of it has ever come close to how afraid I was of losing you.”

She pulled him toward her and he came, resting his head against her shoulder like a man who had been standing too long and had finally found something that would hold his weight.

The children came in after that.

Monica reached the bed first, and Lucia opened her arms, and Monica went into them and held on.

“I’m okay,” Lucia said.

Monica pulled back to look at her. “You scared me.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

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“You have to stop doing that,” Monica said. “Carrying things alone until they turn into something bigger than they need to be. We’re right here.”

Lucia looked at her daughter and thought of the girl who once sat in a principal’s office keeping weeks of bullying to herself so she wouldn’t be a burden to anyone. She was looking at what that girl had grown into.

“I promise,” Lucia said.

Monica held on once more.

Then Lucas looked across the bed at Alexander, wearing the tone he used right before saying something the moment didn’t call for.

“So,” he said. Everyone looked at him. “What are we hoping for?”

“Twins,” Monica said instantly.

The last of the tension in the room let go.

“A boy and a girl,” she added, with the certainty of someone announcing a decision already made.

“You understand we don’t get to place orders with the universe,” Lucas said.

“We should,” Monica said.

“I want a girl,” Ria said, smiling.

Monica pointed at her. “Exactly.”

“Another girl would be perfect,” Lena said.

Lucas looked around the room like a man watching a coalition form against him. “There are already a lot of girls in this family. I say this with complete love. But there are so many girls.”

Ria raised an eyebrow.

“I love all of you,” Lucas said, sounding more sincere than he ever did while defending himself. “But I need someone on my side. A brother. Someone who agrees with me when the rest of you gang up.”

“There are only four of us,” Lena said.

“Five, counting Mum,” Lucas said.

Lucia laughed from the bed.

“You see?” Lucas said to her. “Outnumbered even in a hospital room.”

Lena had been watching Alexander, who sat with his hand over Lucia’s, the last hour still written across his face. She decided she wasn’t letting it pass without comment.

“Dad is about to cry,” she said.

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Chapter 300

“I am not.”

Lucas studied him. “You absolutely are.”

Lena started it, quiet and sing song. “Daddy is about to cry.”

Ria joined in, laughing. “Daddy is about to cry.”

Monica tried to hold back and gave up, laughing too.

Lucas glanced at the ceiling, decided his dignity wasn’t worth the cost, and joined them.

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Alexander looked at the four of them gathered around his wife’s bed, doing this on the day he thought he might lose her, and then looked at Lucia, who was laughing the way she rarely let herself laugh, freely, without holding anything back.

“I cannot believe my own family does this to me,” he said.

“You deserve it,” Lucia said.

“Entirely,” Ria said.

The room settled into the kind of quiet that comes after people have been frightened together and made it through to the other side. The singing stopped. Lucas went to find coffee. Ria and Lena sat by the window talking. Monica stayed close to her mother.

Lucia looked around at all of them and thought about the woman she had been at the start of it all, sitting in a lawyer’s office planning a revenge campaign that had cost her years and nearly everything, and had somehow built this instead. This room. These people.

“I never thought I would have this,” she said.

They all looked at her.

“A family that stays because it wants to,” she said. “Not out of duty or blood or circumstance. Just because it chose to.”

Alexander squeezed her hand.

“You built this,” he said.

She shook her head. “We built it.”

Later, once the children had gone down to the cafeteria arguing over names none of them would get to choose, Alexander sat back down beside Lucia in the room that had gone quiet around them.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

She smiled. “Yes. Not only because of the baby.” She looked at him. “Because today I saw how much I matter to all of you. I’ve spent so many years taking care of everyone else. I forgot I was allowed to be the one who needed taking care of sometimes.”

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He kissed her forehead. “You’ve always mattered. You just spent too many years around people who made you forget it.”

Outside the door, clearly audible, a disagreement was underway over whether the baby should have a traditional name or what Lucas called reasonable and Ria called boring.

Lucia heard it and smiled. Alexander heard it and smiled too.

And the room held both of them in its quiet, the two people who had built the thing arguing on the other side of the door, one decision at a time, over months that had been hard and surprising and finally, real.

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