Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 332

Chapter 332

Chapter 332

The desk drawer was locked.

Lucas had locked it when he came back to his room after the confrontation in Ruth’s guest room, the diary inside, the key in his pocket, and he’d stood looking at the drawer a long time before sitting down on the bed to message his sisters.

Come to my room. Don’t let anyone see you.

Past one in the morning. The house had gone back to its night sounds, but a different kind of quiet than usual, the kind that felt like it was listening.

Monica arrived first. Then, two minutes later, Ria in her dressing gown with her hair loose. Then Lena, who must have already been awake, waiting only for someone to give her a reason to move.

Lucas locked the door, unlocked the drawer, and set the diary on the bed between them.

Nobody touched it right away.

“I didn’t tell you everything,” he said.

He held out his phone, and the four of them gathered around the screen, Ruth taking the envelope, the man’s face zoomed close enough to see clearly.

Ria frowned. “He looks exactly like Dad.”

“I thought Lucas was exaggerating,” Lena said quietly.

“So did I,” he said. “Until I saw him in person.”

He filled in the parts he’d held back, the taxi, the club, the guards, the torn hoodie, the confrontation in Ruth’s room, and Monica added the pieces she’d witnessed herself, until the five of them had assembled the whole shape of it together for the first time.

The diary sat between them the whole time.

It felt wrong in a way that was hard to name, not wrong to have taken it, wrong the way objects get when they’ve absorbed too much of a person and end up somewhere they were never meant to go.

Lucas opened the cover.

Lucia Kane stole my future.

I will take hers.

Lena exhaled slowly. “She’s hated Mum for years.”

“Longer than that,” Lucas said, turning the page.

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The early entries were dated years back, the handwriting younger, looser, lighter on the page. He read one aloud. “Marco walked me home again today. We’ve known each other since we were children. Nobody understands him the way I do.”

Monica looked at the bed instead of the diary. “She really did love him.”

Nobody argued, because the page said it plainly, ordinary words about an ordinary afternoon.

He let the next several entries pass without stopping, the same childhood warmth running through all of them, Marco’s protection, small hopes, one day I’ll tell him how I feel.

“They were really childhood friends,” Lena said. “This is real.”

Lucas didn’t answer that, just kept reading, the pages turning quicker now as the entries changed shape. The ink pressed harder into the paper, like the hand holding the pen had started applying more weight without deciding to.

He read three in a row without comment. Lucia smiling at him at school. Marco asking her out. I waited too long.

Ria looked at the closed cover without touching it. “That’s where everything started.”

He skipped ahead through the years Ruth worked at Hart Industries, entries more frequent now, some only days apart. He read one. “He offered me a position. Executive Assistant. At least I can stay close to him.”

Monica pressed her mouth together. “She took the job to be near him.”

He nodded, then caught himself doing it and just kept going instead. Another entry, further along. “Every morning he asks if Lucia has eaten before she comes in. Every evening he leaves early to get home to her. He never notices me waiting.”

“He wasn’t leading her on,” Lena said quietly.

“No,” Lucas said. “He was just being Dad.”

The confession entry was visible from across the room before he even reached it, the letters uneven, the line drifting off the margin.

“Today I told him. I finally told him. He apologized. He said he loved Lucia. He said they were having a baby.”

A different pen for the next line, like she’d set it down and come back later. “He smiled when he said it. He didn’t even notice that he smiled.”

Ria pressed her fingers over her eyes. “She completely broke at that point.”

Lucas didn’t answer. He turned the page instead.

Everything after the confession read differently, the small ordinary details gone, replaced by something denser, thought instead of diary, the inside of a mind instead of the outside of a day.

“If Lucia hadn’t come back. Marco would have found me eventually. She stole the life that was supposed to be

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mine.”

Several pages further, alone on its own line: “One day fate will give me back what she took.”

Monica closed her eyes for a second. “That’s not grief anymore.”

“No.” Lucas said. “It’s something else.”

The entries after their father’s death carried the darkest ink in the whole book, bleeding through the paper in places, lines starting and stopping without any care for the ruled margins.

“Margaret pulled the trigger. But Lucia caused all of it. If Lucia had divorced him earlier. If she had stayed away. If she hadn’t come back into his life when she did. Marco would have chosen me. Eventually he would have chosen me.”

Nobody spoke for a long moment.

Lena was the first. “She genuinely believes it.” Not a question. A recognition of something true.

“She built a whole other version of everything inside her head,” Lucas said. “And she’s been living there for decades. She’s not pretending. She actually believes that without Mum, Dad would have chosen her. She believes Mum cost her everything.”

He closed the diary.

“That’s what makes her actually dangerous,” he said. “She’s not doing this for money. Not for ordinary revenge. She thinks she’s correcting a wrong. Taking back something that was stolen from her.”

Ria stared at the closed cover. “So what do we do?”

“Do we tell Mum?” Lena asked, right behind it.

“No,” Lucas said, without pausing.

They all looked at him.

“If we tell them tonight, they throw Ruth out. The second she’s gone, Marcus disappears. Every trail goes cold. Every piece of evidence she hasn’t already hidden gets destroyed by someone with the resources to destroy things properly.” He looked around at each of them. “We lose everything.”

“We need something nobody can argue with,” Monica said.

“Real proof,” Lucas said. “The kind that takes everything down at once.”

Ria nodded slowly. “Then we keep going.”

The diary went back into the drawer. The key went back into his pocket. Ria left first, then Lena, and Monica lingered at the door a moment, looking back at him with the expression she wore for things that hadn’t found their ending yet.

He nodded once, and she went.

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He locked the door and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, thinking about Ruth sitting at their dinner table for two weeks with this diary three doors away, with twenty years of their mother’s life catalogued in a suitcase under the guest room window, with a plan she’d been building since the night she stood outside a cemetery in the rain.

He thought about what Lena had said.

She genuinely believes it.

That was the part that kept arriving and refused to settle into anything manageable.

Late that night, Ruth returned to her room.

She crossed to the suitcase, unlocked it, and lifted the false base to look at the empty space where the diary had been.

She looked at it a long time.

Then the smile came. Not the polished, pleasant one she wore for the family. Something else, something that had been sitting behind that one the whole time.

“I wondered how long it would take,” she said.

She set the base back into place and stood, looking at the wall that separated her room from Lucas’s.

“They’re reading it right now,” she said.

She switched off the lamp, the room going dark, and her last words landed quietly into it, entirely certain.

“They think they’re investigating me.”

A pause.

“They’re already exactly where I need them to be.”

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