Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 328

Chapter 328

Chapter 328

Lucas had the photographs spread across his desk by the time the rest of the house started moving.

The printed image from the archived company website sat on the left, the one showing Ruth positioned behind Marco at the corporate event. The other files stayed open on his laptop beside it. He’d been sitting in the same chair since four in the morning, since Ria finally went back to her room, his eyes feeling rubbed with sand, and still he couldn’t stop staring at the photograph.

Movement in the corridor. The kitchen. The front door, and the layered noise of reporters outside the gate growing louder as the morning wore on.

None of it really reached him.

He kept thinking about Ruth’s expression in the kitchen, the brief unguarded flash before she’d put the other face back on. He kept thinking about what she’d whispered to the photograph in her room, believing herself alone.

His phone buzzed. News alerts, again. He turned it face down.

He crossed to the window a third time, not expecting anything different, just needing to be standing instead of sitting.

He saw her.

Ruth was crossing the garden toward the side of the house, not the front entrance with all the cameras, but the side gate the maintenance staff used. Coat on, bag over her shoulder, glancing left and right before touching the latch, the specific care of someone checking they weren’t observed.

He was already pulling on his hoodie before he’d consciously decided anything.

He grabbed his phone and the small camera Ria had given him three weeks earlier for exactly this, and slipped down the back stairs near the laundry room and out through the side door into the cold morning air.

He kept enough distance that she wouldn’t spot him turning.

She didn’t turn.

She walked to the main road and flagged a taxi from the corner.

He waited until it pulled away before stepping off the curb and raising his own hand.

“Follow that cab,” he told the driver. “Not close. Keep a few cars between us.”

The driver checked him in the mirror. Sixteen, camera around his neck, doing his best to look older than he

was.

“You following your girlfriend?”

“It’s family.”

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