Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 327

Chapter 327

Chapter 327

Lucia sat in the kitchen for twenty minutes after Alexander’s legal team called.

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The call had been efficient and urgent the way calls from that office always were, and the advice was what she’d expected: stay inside, don’t engage with the press, issue a written statement through the firm, wait for the cycle to exhaust itself.

She ended the call and sat with the phone in her lap.

She thought about the last time she’d taken advice like that, let something play out without her in it, and where that approach had left her. She thought about everything she’d rebuilt since, about Alexander in the second guest room, the camera vans outside the gate, the shares falling on a trading floor full of people who had never met her husband deciding what his character was worth.

She set the phone on the table, went upstairs, and changed her clothes.

Ruth was in the corridor when she came back down, not passing through it, standing in it, clearly waiting.

“I can help,” Ruth said. “I can make a statement. I can go out there and tell them none of this is what they’re reporting. They’ll listen to me. I’m the one they want to talk to.”

Lucia said nothing.

Ria appeared in the kitchen doorway, wearing the same expression she’d carried since the notifications started that morning.

“The problem,” Ria said, even and steady, “started with you walking through our front door. Everything happening outside that gate begins and ends with your presence in this house. Put away whatever you’re offering. We are not interested.”

Ruth held her gaze a moment, then stepped back out of the corridor.

Alexander waited at the bottom of the stairs with his coat already in hand, having seen where Lucia was going before she’d said a word, the fluency of two people who’d lived long enough together to read intention off the angle of a walk.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

She gave him a clear, steady look. “Yes.”

She reached past him for her own coat.

The gate opened. They walked out together.

The noise hit immediately, the physical wall of sound a crowd of reporters makes when the thing they’ve been waiting for finally appears. Voices calling both their names, cameras clicking in the fast rhythm of people trying to catch something that might last only seconds.

Lucia didn’t slow down. She walked toward the press line the same way she walked into a boardroom, already decided, already moving.

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Chapter 327

Alexander stayed beside her.

A microphone appeared in front of her. Then another.

“Mrs. Kane, what do you say to reports that your husband”

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“Is the baby even his?” someone shouted from further back, the question cutting sharp over the rest of the noise.

Lucia stopped and turned toward it, which turned her toward every camera at once, handing them the image they’d use.

She didn’t look rattled. She looked like a woman who had come outside to say something and was saying it.

“My husband and I are not hiding from this,” she said, her voice pitched to carry. “We are not sending statements out from behind closed doors or asking our lawyers to speak for us. We are standing here because this is our home and our lives, and we are not going to spend them running from things that aren’t true.”

“The reports confirm” a voice pushed in.

“The reports repeat a claim,” Lucia said. “Repeating a claim does not confirm it. Truth does not become false because it is repeated loudly.”

Questions kept coming, overlapping, urgent. She didn’t answer all of them. She met each camera that came close enough to matter and kept her face the face of someone with nothing to manage.

“We will address this through the appropriate legal and factual process,” she said. “And when the truth is fully established, we will stand here again.”

Alexander stayed beside her the whole time. He didn’t speak to the cameras. He didn’t need to. Standing there, not behind her, not apart from her, said everything that needed saying.

When she turned to go back through the gate, the questions kept coming at their backs, but the moment had already happened, and the cameras had what they came for, and it wasn’t the image anyone had expected to capture that morning.

The gate closed. The house was quieter than the street they’d left behind.

Alexander stood in the entrance hall, watching her hang her coat back on the rack, her hands steady, her back straight, moving with the full composure of someone who had gone outside and done exactly what needed doing.

He’d been watching her for months now, through the hospital and the twins and the award and Margaret and Ruth’s arrival and everything that had pulled them apart in the weeks since, understanding a dozen different versions of her through all of it. What he saw now confirmed something he’d been hoping was still there underneath.

She had stood beside him.

Not because the cameras required it, or the lawyers had suggested it. She had gone upstairs, changed her clothes, come back down, looked him in the eye, and said yes.

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He didn’t say anything.

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She finished with her coat and turned and caught his face, and the look on it wasn’t something she could pretend she hadn’t seen.

“Don’t read too much into it,” she said, not cold, just honest, the honesty of someone who had done one thing without pretending it had solved everything else still sitting unresolved between them.

She walked toward the kitchen.

He stayed in the hallway, listening through the wall as she filled the kettle, the ordinary sound of a woman in her own kitchen on a morning when the gate outside was full of cameras and the shares were falling and the guest room three floors up held someone who had come to take everything apart.

She had still walked out beside him.

He put one hand flat against the wall and stood there a moment. His phone was already filling with missed calls. The board could wait a minute longer. He stayed where he was, listening to the small domestic sound of tea being made a few room

s away, and let himself have that before he picked up the phone and got back to work.

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11:01 Wed, Jul 29