Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 303

Chapter 303

The file was thick.

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Alexander’s assistant had placed it on the desk twenty minutes ago and Alexander had not opened it immediately. He sat with it in front of him and looked at the closed cover and thought about the word closer, which his assistant had used last night, and everything that word implied about a year that had already produced more betrayals than most people encountered in a lifetime.

The security team lead stood near the door. His assistant stood beside the desk.

“Tell me,” Alexander said.

The assistant opened the file.

Phone records. Screenshots of a text exchange. CCTV images, the quality grainy but the subject identifiable, a man in a dark jacket outside the hospital car park the afternoon Lucia had been brought in. Bank records showing a transfer of funds made four days later. Timestamps that aligned precisely with the hour the first article went live.

Alexander looked at the photographs.

He looked at the name written at the top of the first page.

James.

He had worked for Alexander for eight years. He had driven Monica to school on the morning of the first Lowe press conference when Alexander had been in three meetings and could not take her himself. He had known where Lena’s Saturday art class was held. He had known the security code for the estate gate. He had known Lucia’s hospital appointment because he had been the one to drive her.

Alexander looked at the text exchange on the third page.

Reporter: Is the pregnancy confirmed?

James: Four weeks.

Reporter: Hospital?

James sends the name.

He closed the file.

He asked his assistant to bring James to the office.

James came in with the particular ease of someone who had not yet understood what room he was walking into. He smiled when he saw Alexander, the small professional smile of someone who expected to be given an errand or asked about the day’s schedule.

“Good morning, sir.”

Alexander gestured toward the chair across the desk.

James sat down.

The smile lasted approximately three seconds after he registered the assistant standing to one side and the security team lead standing near the door and the file on the desk. Then it was gone,

Alexander let the silence sit for a moment before he spoke

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Chapter 303

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“Someone sold private information about my wife,” he said. His voice was exactly the same level as it always was. “Do you know anything about it?”

“No, sir.” Immediate. Too quick. “That’s terrible. People are completely…

“Do you know anything about it.”

Not a question this time. Something flatter.

James looked at the file on the desk. He looked at the assistant. He looked at Alexander.

He kept talking. “I wouldn’t… I mean, whoever did that, they should be…”

Alexander opened the file and slid the first photograph across the desk.

James looked at it.

CCTV footage. The car park. A woman in a dark coat. James, in the jacket he had worn that day, standing two metres from her, his phone in his hand.

Alexander slid the bank record across.

Then the phone records.

Then the text screenshots.

James stopped breathing normally. The sound of it changed, became audible, became the sound of someone whose body was no longer cooperating with what their mind was trying to do.

“Would you like to tell me the truth now?” Alexander said.

James tried one more time, the last attempt of a man who knows the attempt will fail.

“Sir, I….”

Whatever he was going to say did not come.

His shoulders went down. The way shoulders went down when a person stopped holding something up.

He covered his face with both hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said,

The words came out broken.

He told them.

His daughter. She was twelve. A kidney condition, the kind that had been manageable until recently and then had stopped being manageable, the kind that required procedures the family insurance refused to cover because of a clause James had not understood when he signed the policy years ago. He had sold his car. He had borrowed against the small amount of savings he had. He had taken a loan from his brother. He had been sitting at a point where the money that remained and the bill that was coming did not connect, and a woman had contacted him through a private message on a social media account he barely used and had offered an amount that covered everything his daughter needed with enough left over to cover the months of recovery.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he said. His face was wet. “I know that’s not an excuse. I know that. I only told them she was pregnant. I thought they’d just…. I thought it would be a small piece of news. I didn’t think they’d… He looked at Alexander. “I swear I didn’t know it would become what it became.

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Chapter 303

The office door opened.

Lucia.

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She had heard raised voices through the wall, the particular quality of a confrontation that was too quiet, and she had come.

She took in the scene. James in the chair, his face destroyed. The file on the desk. Alexander standing with his hands at his sides.

“What happened,” she said.

Alexander told her.

She listened without interrupting. When he finished she stood for a moment looking at James, who could not look back at her, whose eyes had fixed on the corner of the desk and stayed there.

“James,” she said.

He did not look up.

“In eight years,” she said, “has Alexander ever refused someone in this household who came to him with a genuine need?”

He shook his head. He was barely making sound now.

“Have we ever turned someone away who was in real trouble?”

“No,” he said.

“Then why,” she said, and her voice was not raised, was not hard, was simply asking a real question that needed a real answer, “why didn’t you ask?”

The question landed in the room and stayed there.

James pressed his hands over his face again.

“I was ashamed,” he said. “I thought….” He stopped. “I thought if I asked you’d say yes to make me feel better and then resent it. I thought you’d feel like I was taking advantage.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I thought. I wasn’t thinking. I was just….” He stopped again. “My daughter is twelve.”

Lucia looked at her husband.

Alexander looked at James.

He walked to the front of the desk and stood there and the room was very quiet.

“You drove my children to school,” he said. “You knew their schedules and their routes and which friends they visited. You knew where my wife went and when she went there.” He did not raise his voice, which made every word land in the specific way quiet words landed when they came from a person who almost never raised his voice. “When you needed help, instead of asking, you sold that access.”

James made a sound that was not a word.

Alexander waited until it stopped.

“Do you understand what you did,” he said.

“Yes,” James said.

“Not the financial transaction, Alexander said. “What you actually did. You took the trust that I placed in you when I let you

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Chapter 303

into this house and you gave it to a stranger with a check in her hand.”

James was shaking.

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“Please,” he said. He had slid forward in the chair into something closer to a kneeling position. “Please. Without this job I can’t…. my daughter needs….”

Alexander looked at Lucia.

She gave him a very slight movement of her head.

He turned back.

“James,” he said. “I could have you arrested. Medical privacy. Breach of confidentiality. Sale of private information.” He said each one plainly, the way you read charges off a page. “There are enough grounds here to make the next several years of your life something you would not survive easily.”

James had stopped breathing again.

“I’m not going to pursue that,” Alexander said.

A sound came out of James.

“I am doing that for your daughter,” Alexander said. “Not for you. Your daughter is twelve years old and her treatment should not be delayed because her father made a terrible decision when he was desperate.” He reached for the envelope on his desk. “Your daughter’s medical bills will be paid in full. That is the last thing this family will do for you.”

James was crying in the way people cried when they had nothing left to perform for.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t,” Alexander said. “Collect your final salary. Pack what belongs to you. I want you out of this house before this evening. From this moment you no longer work for this family.”

James stood.

He stood slowly, the way people stood when their legs were not entirely reliable, and he took the envelope with both hands.

He walked out.

In the hallway, the four children were there. They had heard enough. None of them spoke. They watched the man who had driven them to school and to their friends and to every errand they had needed walk past them toward the entrance of the house with the envelope in his hand and tears on his face.

Monica watched him go.

Lena watched.

Ria and Lucas watched.

None of them said anything until the front door had closed.

“I wish he had trusted us,” Lucia said, more to herself than to the room.

Alexander took her hand.

“So do I,” he said.

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