Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 304

12:28 Thu, Jul 16 ) )

Chapter 304

Chapter 304

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The staff quarters were at the east end of the estate, away from the main house, with their own small courtyard and the specific contained quiet of a space that existed to support the larger life happening elsewhere.

James’s room was the first on the left.

He had folded his uniform first. The dark trousers, the jacket with the Kane family insignia on the breast pocket, both laid flat and precise on the bed in the specific way of someone who is doing a thing for the last time and knows if. The personal items after that: a photograph of his daughter at her school concert, her in the center of the second row with her face lit up in the way faces lit up when a child did not yet know she was being photographed. A small Bible. A pair of reading glasses in a soft case. A mug he had kept in his room for eight years.

He put the mug back on the shelf.

He could not bring himself to put it in the bag.

The housekeeper who lived two doors down passed his doorway and stopped and looked at the open suitcase on the bed. She had been working here for four years. James had been here before she arrived.

“I never thought it would be like this,” she said.

Another staff member, the one who maintained the grounds, appeared behind her.

“Neither did I.,” he said.

James did not answer either of them. He closed the suitcase.

He picked it up and walked down the corridor and out through the small door that opened onto the courtyard.

The four children were at the front of the house.

He had not expected them to be there and he stopped for a moment when he saw them, his hand tight on the handle of the suitcase. Monica was in the center. Ria and Lena flanked her. Lucas stood slightly to the left, hands in his pockets, watching James cross the courtyard with the same expression he had brought to every difficult thing this year, the one that meant he was processing rather than performing.

James lowered his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Nobody responded immediately. The sound of the gate, somewhere beyond the driveway. A car on the road.

Monica looked at him.

“Why?” she said. Not hostile. Just asking.

He looked at her.

“I wish I had a better answer than I do,” he said.

Lucas spoke quietly from his position to the left.

“Was this family really worth selling?”

James shook his head immediately, the movement involuntary. “No. Never.” His voice broke on the second word. “My daughter…” He stopped. Je pressed his lips together. He did not finish the sentence.

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Chapter 304

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Lena was looking at him and the expression on her face was not the expression she wore when she was angry. She was/ thinking about the bicycle. Three years ago, she had been trying to learn to ride without the training wheels and Alexander had been traveling. James had come out to the driveway in the late afternoon and spent an hour running alongside her until she stopped falling. She had not thought about that in a long time.

Ria was thinking about the afternoons outside her school, the car always exactly in the same spot, James always with a coffee from the place on the corner because the school coffee was what he called an insult to the concept. The reliability of it. Months of afternoon consistency.

None of them were angry anymore.

They were disappointed in the specific way you could only be disappointed by someone you had trusted and had not thought to question trusting.

The front door opened.

Lucia came out slowly, with the careful movements she was still managing from yesterday’s instructions, and James saw her and his head dropped further, his chin nearly touching his chest.

She stopped near the children.

“How is your daughter?” she said.

James looked up.

He had not expected that to be the first thing she said.

“She’s stable,” he said. “They think the next procedure will…” He stopped. “She’s stable.”

Lucia nodded.

“I’m glad,” she said.

He started crying again, the quiet kind, the kind that had been there underneath everything since he walked out of the office with the envelope in his hand.

“Mrs. Kane,” he said. Her name barely made it out. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I betrayed you. I betrayed this whole family and I had no right to and I can’t…”

“Yes,” she said.

The word stopped him.

Not cold. Not hard. Just honest.

“And that’s what hurts the most,” she said. “Not the publicity. Not the comments strangers made about me online. The fact that you were in this house for eight years and when you needed something you went to a reporter instead of us.”

James wiped his face with the back of his hand.

Alexander came through the door.

The atmosphere shifted the way it shifted when Alexander entered a space, not dramatically, just perceptibly, the temperature of the room changing in the specific way it changed around a man who had been running things long enough that his presence itself communicated something.

He looked at James.

“The car is waiting,” he said.

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Chapter 304

James picked up his suitcase.

At the gate he turned back one last time.

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“I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting this,” he said. He was looking at Alexander, but the statement was for all of them.

Alexander looked at him.

“I hope you do,” he said.

Not unkindly. Not as punishment. Just as the truth.

The taxi pulled away.

The family stood and watched it until the road was empty and there was only the sound of the gate settling and the ordinary noise of the estate.

They went inside.

The house had a different quality for the rest of the morning, the specific quality of a space where something had been removed. Not a physical thing. Something harder to name, the invisible weight of eight years of assumed trust that had been sitting in the rooms without anyone noticing it until it was gone.

Lucas was the first to say it.

“It feels strange,” he said.

Monica nodded.

“He was just here,” she said. “Every day. Part of how this house worked.”

Lena sat on the edge of the sofa. “Now every time someone new comes through that gate,” she said, and stopped,

“You’ll wonder,” Alexander said.

“Yes,” she said.

Nobody argued with that.

In the afternoon Lucia sat in her usual corner of the sofa with the blanket and the book she was still not fully reading, and Alexander sat beside her with his phone and noticed, after a while, that the book was on the same page it had been on for forty minutes.

“You’re blaming yourself,” he said.

She did not deny it. “If I had been more attentive. If I had asked how he was doing at some point in the past months instead of just assuming that people in this house were alright….”

“Lucia,” he said.

She looked at him.

“His choice belongs to him,” he said. “You could have asked every week. He could have answered every week that he was fine. People make the decisions they make and the decisions belong to them.”

She sat with that.

Later, when the children had dispersed into the evening rhythms of the house, they all sat together in the sitting room and talked about it in the way this family talked about difficult things, not avoiding it, not dwelling in it either.

12:28 Thu, Jul 16 )) JM

Chapter 304

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“He should have asked,” Lucas said. “If he’d asked we’d have sorted it. Mum would have paid every bill without thinking

twice.”

“Instead he trusted someone who offered money,” Ria said.

Lena looked at her hands. “Do you think you can forgive someone,” she said, “without trusting them again? Are those two things separate?”

Ria looked at her.

“They have to be,” she said. “Forgiveness is something you do for yourself. It lifts the weight you’d otherwise carry.” She paused. “Trust is different. Trust has to be earned and it takes time and some people don’t get the chance to earn it back because they’ve closed that door themselves.” She looked toward the window. “James closed that door. But I won’t carry hatred for him. It costs too much.”

The room held that.

That evening Alexander called his foundation director from his office with the door closed.

He made a payment arrangement for James’s daughter’s treatment. Full amount. Anonymously. The instruction was specific and he gave it once and did not repeat it.

He was putting his phone down when Lucia came through the door and he could tell from her expression that she had heard enough.

She smiled at him.

“You fired him,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you’re paying his daughter’s medical bills.”

“His daughter has nothing to do with what he did.”

“You told him the mercy was for her.”

“It is.”

She walked to him.

“You are considerably softer than you allow anyone to believe,” she said..

“If that gets back to the children I will deny it,” he said.

She kissed him.

He was still holding his phone when it vibrated.

His lawyer.

He answered.

“Sir.” The lawyer’s voice had the specific caution of someone who is about to say something they know will not be received well. “We’ve had communication from the media company regarding the takedown request.”

“And?”

“They’re declining to remove the story. Their legal teamn says they have the right to report on public figures and their

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Chapter 304

position is that the pregnancy, once disclosed, was a matter of public record.”

“We’ll pursue it,” Alexander said.

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“There’s more,” the lawyer said. “They’ve responded with a statement claiming they have information about this family beyond the pregnancy. They’re saying there is a significantly larger story that they’re investigating.”

Alexander went very still.

“What kind of information?”

“They won’t specify,” the lawyer said. “Their statement says they’ve been contacted by multiple sources and that the pregnancy was only the beginning.”

Alexander looked toward the doorway where Lucia had been standing a moment ago.

She was still there, in the hall, and she had heard enough of it.

Her eyes met his.

“Find out everything,” he said to the lawyer. “What sources. What they’re claiming to have. I want to know before they publish a single word.”

He ended the call.

Lucia walked back into the room.

They looked at each other.

“We’re not done,” she said.

“No,” he said.

He set the phone on the desk.

The evening had been warm and the house had been quiet and Lucia’s blanket/was still on the sofa and the crackers were still on the side table.

And somewhere out there, someone had something.

And they had not said yet what it was.

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