Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 324

Chapter 324

A silence passed that wasn’t uncomfortable. Alexander almost smiled.

The front door opened behind them.

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Ruth Walker came through it, coat on, bag in hand, the same composed manner she always carried. She stopped when she saw them on the porch, unsurprised to find them there.

“You were meant to be in the hospital,” Alexander said, his voice back to the flat register he kept just for her.

“I asked to be discharged.”

“They said observation for twenty four hours.”

“I signed myself out. I’m entitled to.”

She looked at them both with the same expression she always wore, nothing in it that could be called aggression, just someone who had done what she’d done and considered it settled. She went inside.

Alexander watched the door close. Lucas watched his father’s jaw tighten.

They sat another twenty minutes without saying much, then Alexander said he’d try to sleep, and Lucas said goodnight and went upstairs.

The hallway was dim, the house asleep except for the small sounds a large house makes at night. He passed the east corridor. The door at the end sat open.

Ruth’s door. Not wide, just ajar, lamplight spilling through the gap instead of the overhead. Movement inside.

He should have kept walking.

He slowed. Stopped.

Through the gap he saw Ruth near the window, a photograph held in both hands, the printed kind, small enough for a wallet or a frame. Her thumb moved across it slowly, the motion of someone who had held this same photograph many times before.

He couldn’t see what was in it from where he stood.

Ruth wasn’t looking at the door, only at the picture, her face doing something he hadn’t seen from her in ten days. The composure was gone. All of it, the soft tones, the pleasant manner, none of it there. What remained looked genuine, the private face of someone who thought they were alone.

Her lips moved, barely, a whisper aimed at the photograph.

“I finally came back,” she said.

Lucas caught only some of it, the words arriving no louder than breath.

He didn’t move. He stood with the cold hallway air on his face and didn’t breathe loud enough to be heard.

Ruth set the photograph on the bed and walked to the bathroom. The door closed.

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angle of the open door just as the bathroom door swung

glancing toward the hallway. Lucas stayed pressed against the wall outside, his heart loud enough in his own ears that he thought she might hear it too.

He waited until she’d settled again, until her back was to the door, and slipped out of the room, easing the door back to the same angle it had been at, ajar, lamplight through the gap.

He stood in the corridor. His hands weren’t steady.

His mind kept circling back to the man in the photograph. Something about the face had looked familiar in the two seconds he’d had to look at it, and now, walking away, he made himself go back through it slowly.

Not Alexander.

His breath caught.

Marco.

His biological father. Buried six months ago under a tree in the east wall cemetery, white lilies and a whiskey bottle left beside the stone. Dead.

Marco’s face had looked up from that duvet mid expression, caught the way photographs catch people, unaware they’d end up years later in someone else’s hands, in a room that had nothing to do with anything he’d ever known.

Lucas stood very still, his mind assembling pieces fast. Ruth Walker had a photograph of Marco Hart. She had brought it into this house. She had pressed her thumb across his face and whispered I finally came back, and the words that had sounded like one thing thirty seconds ago now meant something else entirely, something larger and far more deliberately built than anything he’d expected to find tonight.

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