Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 321

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Chapter 321

Chapter 321

The conversation happened in Lucas’s room at eleven at night.

Monica had knocked. He’d been awake, which she’d expected, because he’d been awake at cleven every night since Ruth Walker moved into the east guest room, and his light was visible from the corridor.

She sat on the end of the bed. He sat at his desk, laptop open with several browser tabs, a notepad beside him covered in the tight handwriting he used when working through a problem.

“Dad didn’t do this,” he said, without looking up, as if continuing a conversation they’d already been having, which in some sense they had, both of them turning it over privately for days.

Monica pulled her knees up. “How can you be so sure?”

He looked up then, his expression carrying the conviction of someone who had already reached a conclusion and wasn’t forming an opinion anymore, only stating a fact.

“Because this isn’t the man I’ve known this past year.”

Monica stayed quiet.

“I know that doesn’t sound like evidence,” he said. “I know you can’t hand that to a lawyer. But I’ve watched him through everything. The lawsuits, the hospital, the court hearings, the mornings when everything was wrong and the evenings when things finally weren’t.” He glanced at the screen. “His face didn’t do what a guilty face does in that living room. I know what guilt looks like. I’ve seen enough of it this year.”

Monica looked at the notepad. “What are you looking at?”

“Zurich. His schedule that week.” He turned the laptop so she could see. “He had three meetings on the seventeenth, two on the eighteenth, all with documented attendees, all on calendars his PA manages, not just him.” He tapped the screen. “A man doesn’t run a one night affair on a night he has a business dinner with eight verified witnesses.”

“She said it was that evening,” Monica said.

“October seventeenth, specifically,” Lucas said. “According to the calendar his assistant gave me, at seven fifteen that night he was at dinner with the heads of three Swiss investment firms. It ran until ten forty five.”

Monica leaned forward.

“It’s not enough on its own,” Lucas admitted. “A calendar can be changed. An assistant can be told what to say. know that.” He closed the laptop. “But it’s enough to know this is worth digging into properly.”

He looked at his sister. “I want to know who Ruth Walker actually is. Where she came from. Who she knows. Who might have paid her.” He folded his arms. “The photo had a wrong shadow. She showed up with evidence that was too complete. And she’s been too perfect since she got here. Nobody genuinely frightened and pregnant and stuck in an impossible situation walks into a stranger’s house and behaves like a visiting dignitary.”

Monica was already thinking ahead. “Ria.”

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10:59 Wed, Jul 29

Chapter 321

He nodded.

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They brought Ria in the next morning, early enough that Ruth wouldn’t be down for breakfast yet. Ria listened with her coffee held in both hands, doing the quiet math of someone already three steps ahead.

“I have contacts,” she said. “From my design work. People who investigate reputational risk. Background checks, connections.” She set the coffee down. “If Ruth Walker has history with anyone who wants to hurt this family, they’ll find it.”

“How long?” Lucas asked.

“Depends how deep it goes. A week. Maybe less.”

She made her first call before they’d even left the room.

Lena found out that afternoon, not because anyone told her, but because she’d been watching the three of them trade half sentences around her and knew something was moving. She cornered Lucas in the kitchen and made him tell her, listening with her arms crossed and her head tilted, sorting the information as it landed.

“I can do something,” she said. “DNA. We’ll need it once the baby’s born anyway. But there’s something we can do sooner.” She glanced toward the corridor. “A sample from Ruth. Hair is enough.”

“How are you going to get that?” Monica asked from the doorway, appearing without Lucas noticing.

Lena’s face carried the look of someone already impatient with the question. “Leave it to me.”

That afternoon Ruth sat in the sitting room with a book, the way she did most afternoons. Lena walked through on her way to somewhere else, or seemed to, and paused to ask whether Ruth had found the spare blankets in the wardrobe, because people missed them sometimes. Ruth turned toward the window to answer, and Lena’s hand moved fast, plucking a strand from where it had fallen across the back of the sofa.

Ruth turned back a beat sooner than expected.

“Something wrong?” she asked, eyes catching the small motion of Lena’s arm dropping to her side.

“Just cold,” Lena said, folding her arms like that had been the point of the movement all along. “I’ll grab a sweater.”

She left the room at an ordinary pace, hand closed around what she’d taken, her heart working harder than her face showed.

In the kitchen she opened her hand.

A single strand. She sealed it in a small clear bag from her drawer, the kind pharmacies sold for jewelry, and tucked it behind everything else inside.

She called Lucas. “Done.”

He exhaled.

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Behind her, in the sitting room, Ruth sat very still for a moment, her eyes on the exact spot on the sofa where the strand had come from. Then she turned a page in her book and kept reading, her expression giving away nothing at all.

The four of them gathered in Ria’s room that evening, the particular kind of gathering that happens when people who’ve been apart all day finally feel the full weight of what they’re carrying together.

“DNA if everything else fails,” Ria said. “But we start with everything else.” She looked around at them. “We find out who she is, who sent her, and what this is really about.”

“And if we’re wrong?” Monica asked, the question honest rather than defeated, the kind she asked when she needed the worst option said out loud.

“Then Dad’s the father of her child,” Lena said, “and we deal with that when we have to.” She looked at Monica. “I don’t think we’re wrong.”

The room went quiet. Lucas stared at the window, thinking of his mother at breakfast that morning pouring coffee she’d already poured. Thinking of Alexander down the hall in the second guest room, the house feeling like a body with something vital slightly out of place. Thinking of a whole year with a man who had walked into their lives in the middle of a revenge campaign and stayed anyway, who had married their mother, sat beside Lucas in a closed bedroom when he needed someone there, and made a promise at a graveside that he had meant.

“Dad didn’t do this,” he said again, to all of them this time, less an argument now than something to build on.

“Right,” Ria said, picking up her phone. “Then let’s prove it.”

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