Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 308

The Storm Novel 308The Storm Novel 308

Chapter 308

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The bathroom at the end of the cell block smelled the way it always smelled, badly and permanently, the kind of smell that builds up in enclosed institutional spaces when the cleaning gets done by people who aren’t doing it voluntarily and therefore don’t do it thoroughly.

Margaret was the one doing it today.

She had been the one doing it for the past several weeks, which wasn’t a rotation or any organized system. It was simply how the cell worked, the unspoken hierarchy that had formed in the first months and never changed since.

She knelt on the tile floor with the brush and the disinfectant they were given, chemical and sharp, not quite covering what sat underneath it.

Denise’s voice came from the doorway. “You missed the corner again.”

Margaret didn’t look up.

“I can see it from here,” Denise said. “The far left corner. There’s residue. You want to do the whole thing over because you missed a corner?”

Margaret moved to the far left corner.

“Faster,” Sharon said, from somewhere behind Denise. “Some of us need to use it this morning.”

Margaret worked faster.

The cold had been building in her chest for several days. Not dramatic, not the kind that landed someone in the medical wing, just the steady kind that crept from her throat into her chest and made breathing take a little more effort, made the morning air feel thinner than it should.

She told herself it was the season.

The prison was cold this time of year. The heating in the cell block was unreliable, and the administration didn’t seem to consider that urgent. Several women had been coughing for weeks. Margaret was one of many. She reminded herself of that often.

She was scrubbing the base of the second fitting when it happened.

The cough came suddenly, but it didn’t stop the way coughs usually stopped. It kept going, doubling her forward, her hand hitting the floor to catch herself, her shoulder pressing into the cold tile wall. When she pulled her hand away from her mouth, something dark sat in her palm. Not much. Not what she expected.

She looked at it a moment longer.

Then she wiped her hand on the cleaning cloth and told herself it was nothing. A burst vessel from coughing too hard. The cold. People coughed up blood sometimes and it meant nothing, and she had enough real problems without inventing new ones.

She went back to work.

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12:48 Sat, Jul 18

Chapter 308

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“What’s taking so long?” Lisa’s voice now, from the doorway.

“Nothing,” Margaret said, and kept the brush moving.

The dizziness started slowly. Not a sudden lurch, just a gradual softening at the edges, the doorframe losing its lines, the white tile brighter than it should be, the floor further from her hands than it should have felt.

She sat back on her heels and let the brush rest.

“Did I say you could stop?” Denise said.

Margaret picked the brush back up.

Moving didn’t help the dizziness. It got worse the way it does when you try to work through it, each small turn of her head arriving a half second before the world caught up.

She focused on the tile in front of her face. On the grout lines between them, dark and thin, and kept the brush moving because stopping wasn’t something she’d been given permission to do, and she had learned that arguing with the rules of this place cost more than simply following them.

The letter from her father was under her pillow back in the cell.

She thought about that, the way she had at intervals since the night it arrived, the envelope gone soft from handling.

She thought about her mother across from her in the visiting room, hands open instead of folded.

She thought about Claire’s face the last time she left.

She thought about the small grey shape on a screen from a news photo of Lucia Kane’s family, posted days ago, something in the caption about a heartbeat.

The brush moved. The dizziness worsened.

Margaret set the brush down carefully, like something valuable, and gripped the side of the toilet base with both hands, trying to breathe slow and deliberate the way that sometimes helped.

It didn’t help this time.

The room tilted. Not violently, not all at once, just a slow drift away from level, the floor at the wrong angle, the doorframe wrong too.

She tried to stand.

She got halfway, one knee down and one foot flat on the tile, hand on the wall, breathing too shallow and too fast, her chest doing something she couldn’t make it stop.

She needed to get back to the cell. If she could lie down it would pass.

She let go of the wall and took two steps toward the doorway.

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12:49 Sat, Jul 18

Chapter 308

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The floor came up to meet her.

Not fast. There was a moment of clear understanding, her legs no longer doing what legs were supposed to do, her hand reaching for something that wasn’t there, and then the cold hard tile arrived with a sound she felt more than heard, the whole right side of her face pressed against something very cold and very solid and very close.

She could hear things.

Denise’s voice, higher than usual, calling something she couldn’t make out.

Running, somewhere.

Another voice, further off.

Voices overlapping the way they do when several people speak at once, all of them urgent, none of the words reaching her in order.

The cold tile against her face was very specific.

The grout lines she had been staring at a moment ago were very close now.

Then nothing.

Just the voices, further away than before, receding the way sound recedes when you’re the one moving instead of it, drifting back from the bathroom and the cold tile and the noise into something with no texture, no temperature, no sound at all.

And then that too was gone.

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