Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 331

Chapter 331

Chapter 331

Neither of them heard the door.

They had been looking at the diary, Lucas on the floor, Monica holding the open page toward the low light. the two lines in dark ink taking up all the space in both their minds.

Then the cold air of the corridor reached them.

Both looked up.

Ruth stood in the doorway, still in her dressing gown, either not asleep yet or woken and come to check her room the way people check on things worth protecting.

Her eyes moved from Lucas to Monica, then to the bed. The open suitcase. The passports. The photographs across the duvet. The diary in Monica’s hands.

Something crossed her face, small, gone in under a second, but both of them had been watching her long enough to catch the shape of it before it disappeared.

悦

She stepped inside, closed the door, and folded her arms.

“What are you two doing in my room?”

Her voice stayed measured, pleasant, the same surface it always was.

Lucas got up off the floor. Monica didn’t move, holding the diary behind her back.

Ruth’s eyes tracked the motion and settled on Lucas.

“I believe this falls under breaking and entering.”

“The passports don’t,” he said.

She glanced at the bed. “They’re not what you’re thinking.”

“They’re five different identities in five different countries. Tell me what else they could be.”

The room held its shape, the quiet of a confrontation that has landed and is waiting to see who moves first.

“We know who you are,” Monica said from behind him.

“Do you.”

“No innocent person keeps five passports with five different names,” Monica said. “No innocent person cares twenty years of photographs of someone they’ve never officially met.”

Something shifted in Ruth’s posture, barely there. She was still composed, still recalculating.

Lucas could see it happening.

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Chapter 331

“Can you give me a minute?” he asked Monica.

“No.”

“Please. There’s something I need to ask her.”

Monica understood from his face that it meant the photos on his phone, the ones from that morning he hadn’t shown her yet, not wanting to hand both pieces over at once.

She turned to Ruth. “If you touch my family, I won’t forgive you for it.”

“I have no intention of harming anyone,” Ruth said.

Monica left without answering that. The door closed.

Lucas took out his phone and opened the clearest photo from that morning, Ruth’s hand on the envelope, the man’s profile beside her in full light. He turned the screen toward her.

She looked at it for a second, maybe less.

“I don’t know what that is,” she said.

He laughed once, short, no warmth in it. “You need to do that better.”

He zoomed in on the man’s face. “I followed you. I got in a taxi behind yours. I was behind a pillar when his car arrived. I photographed you taking that envelope. I heard you say his name.” He looked at her over the screen. “Who is he?”

“I don’t owe you explanations.”

“He looks exactly like my father.”

No answer.

He set the phone down and picked up the old company photograph instead, Marco young at the center of a business event, Ruth younger behind his shoulder, and at the edge of the group the man, half turned, jaw and eye unmistakable even in profile.

He held it up and watched her breathing change, one extra movement of her chest, small, but in someone who had kept total control over everything visible about herself since the day she arrived, it was the most significant thing he’d seen from her yet.

“You knew my father,” he said. She said nothing. “You worked for him. You watched my mother for twenty years. You didn’t come here because you had nowhere safe to go. You came here because of her”

“You think you’ve solved it,” Ruth said.

“I’ve barely started.” He set the photograph down and looked at her directly, the way he’d been teaching himself to look at hard things this year, without flinching, without performing calm. “I don’t have all of it yet. I don’t know your plan. I don’t know who he is, I don’t know what the fake pregnancy is meant to do. But I will find out, all of it, and when I do, you will not come near this family again.”

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LEM

finally understand.”

Ruth looked between them a moment, then crossed to the bed, packed the passports and diary back into the hidden compartment, pressed the base into place, closed and latched the suitcase, and set it back on the rack beside the wardrobe. She retied her dressing gown sash.

At the door she stopped beside Lucas, not looking at him.

“Keep searching,” she said quietly. “Some answers destroy people.”

She left. The door closed.

The room went still.

Lucas looked at Monica. Monica looked at the spot on the bed where the photographs had been. Neither spoke. There was nothing left the last hour hadn’t already said.

Ruth walked the corridor at the same unhurried pace she’d used since arriving in this house, pleasant, ordinary, and when the night housekeeper appeared at the far end she smiled and said goodnight in her usual warm voice. The woman smiled back and disappeared through the kitchen door.

Ruth reached the staircase and stopped.

The smile dropped.

She stood on the first step and let herself think clearly for the first time since she’d seen the light under her locked suitcase and understood what it meant.

She had prepared for suspicious adults. She had not prepared for children who could investigate this well.

Her phone buzzed.

*Marcus: They’ve become a problem.*

She looked at the staircase above her, toward the rooms where the children slept, toward the room at the end

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11:24 Thu, Jul 30

Chapter 331

of the hall where Lucia was.

She typed four words.

*Lucia first.*

:))

She pressed send, stood on the staircase a moment longer, then turned and walked back toward her room.

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田

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11:24 Thu, Jul 30