Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 336

11:30 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 336

Chapter 336

The guards had been dismissed an hour ago.

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The house had gone quiet the way large, well staffed houses go quiet once the staff leave and security pulls back to the edges of the property and the person inside is finally, truly alone.

Marcus locked the study door from the inside.

He crossed to the old cabinet in the far corner, the one that had moved with him across three countries in thirty three years, never stored, never left behind. The lock wasn’t modern, just a small brass mechanism from when the cabinet was made, and the key for it lived on a chain around his neck under his collar.

He unlocked it.

Inside sat things with no financial value, which was exactly why they were kept more carefully than anything else he owned. A small stack of letters tied with string that had once been white. Birthday cards. A faded red toy car, the paint worn off the roof where a child’s hand had run along it for years. And at the back of the middle shelf, a framed photograph of two boys.

Ten years old. Identical.

They stood in front of a house he still knew the layout of by heart, both squinting against the sun, both wearing the grin of children told to smile properly and offering up the least cooperative version available

He picked up the frame and looked at Marco’s face.

“You still look exactly the same,” he said, his voice different in this room, none of the control he wore outside it. “Except you’re gone. And I’m still here.”

The past arrived without him calling for it.

They had been inseparable as only young twins are, before the world found ways to put distance between them. Same school, same class, same walk home, same football team. People who met them separately would meet the other one a day later and never be able to tell which conversation belonged to which brother.

Marcus had always been the one who got sick.

He collapsed during a game the autumn they turned ten, and it was Marco at his side before the coach even arrived, hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “That’s enough. You’re not playing anymore.”

“I’m fine,” Marcus said.

Marco gave him the look older brothers gave younger ones, even when they were the same age. “You’re terrible at lying.”

“You’re bossy.”

“Someone has to keep you alive.”

11:30 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 336

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He was joking and not joking at once, the way children say true things they aren’t ready to say seriously yet.

The doctor’s visits grew more frequent. The word the doctors used was serious, and then it became expensive, and then it became impossible, the kind of impossible that meant not with the money this family had.

Their mother’s sister Anna came from London. She had married a man with a great deal of money and no children of her own, and she looked at Marcus the way people look at something they can’t have, and then she had a conversation with Marcus’s parents that he wasn’t meant to hear from the top of the stairs.

He went outside after. He sat under the tree at the back of the garden with his knees pulled up and cried the way children cry when the thing they feared has just been confirmed.

Marco sat beside him. Neither spoke for a long time.

“They’re taking me away,” Marcus said.

Marco shook his head at once. “I’ll tell them no.”

Marcus wiped his face on his sleeve. “You can’t. I have to go. If I don’t, I’ll get worse.” He already understood this, the way children sometimes understand things about themselves before anyone tells them. “You know I’ll get worse.”

Marco’s face did the thing it did when he knew he was going to lose an argument and hadn’t stopped fighting it anyway. He put his arm around his brother. Both of them cried.

After a while Marco pulled back and held out his little finger. “Promise you’ll never forget me.”

Marcus looked at the offered finger, then at his brother’s face. “Never.” He hooked his finger around Marco’s. “Promise.”

“Promise.”

The day Marcus left, suitcases in the car, their mother crying at the gate, Anna trying to hold herself together, the neighborhood going about its ordinary business with no idea what was being divided that morning, Marco pressed something into the pocket of Marcus’s jacket while they hugged.

Marcus found it on the plane. A photograph of the two of them from the summer before, sunburned and squinting, laughing at something the camera hadn’t caught.

On the back, in Marco’s handwriting, already better than Marcus’s would ever be: Brothers forever.

He pressed it against his chest, and the flight attendant who passed pretended not to notice.

He grew stronger in London. The treatment that had once been impossible worked, and Marcus Hart became Marcus Lawnson on official documents, learning to answer to a name he hadn’t grown up with, writing letters

to the brother he’d left behind.

11:30 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 336

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Then: She stood up for me when some boys were being idiots. Just walked between them and said something quiet.

Then: I think I’m in love with her.

Marcus had smiled at that letter for a long time. “You always fell too fast,” he said now, to the memory of it sitting in the bundle on the shelf.

The wedding invitation arrived in a cream envelope, Marco’s handwriting on the front. Please come. I want my brother beside me on this day.

Marcus had been packing when Anna came to his door.

She sat on the edge of his bed and explained the agreement signed when his adoption was finalized. Marco’s biological family, worried about the family debt complications, had included a clause. No formal contact with the family. No appearances at family events. No documented connection.

The lawyers had been thorough.

Anna cried while she explained it. Marcus signed the document his own lawyer had drawn up to confirm compliance, his hands not quite steady.

That night he sat at his desk with the invitation in front of him, Marco’s handwriting asking him to come, and he sat there until the room went completely dark and he never got up to turn on a light.

Years passed the way years pass when you’re living a separate life in a separate country, full and fast, piling into something substantial.

Marcus built a business. It struggled the way first businesses struggle.

A bank transfer arrived that he hadn’t asked for. He called his brother.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

Marco laughed. “You’re my brother. That’s all the reason there is.”

“I’ll pay it back.”

“You won’t. Just stay alive.”

Marco called one evening with his voice carrying something held carefully.

“Lucia came back and she is on a revenge mission,” he said.

Marcus sat down. “Stay away from her.”

Silence. Then, “I still love her.”

“She’ll hurt you,” Marcus said.

“Maybe.”

11:30 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 336

“Then why?”

“Because loving someone doesn’t always stop when they leave,” Marco said.

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Marcus had known already. He’d known reading the old letters months back, known when the divorce happened, known through all of it. Some things didn’t need to be told.

He said everything he could say. Marco changed the subject. Marcus ended the call watching something he couldn’t stop from a distance he couldn’t close.

The final call was about Lucia’s revenge campaign.

Marcus wanted to come. Marco said no.

Marcus raised his voice for the first time in years, and Marco answered quiet, the voice of someone who had already decided and needed his brother to understand the argument wouldn’t change it.

“She’s carrying enough pain,” Marco said. “I don’t want revenge. I want it to be over.”

“You’re protecting her.”

“I’m trying to have peace.”

Marcus hit the desk with his palm. He knew what Marco meant by peace. He always meant Lucia.

The call that came later was from a number he didn’t recognize. He answered it standing at the window of his London study.

By the time he set the phone down he was on the floor. He didn’t remember getting there. He was standing. and then he was on his knees on the carpet, the phone somewhere beside him, and he couldn’t hear anything except the absence of his brother, which wasn’t silence but came close.

Marcus set the photograph back on the shelf and stood in front of the open cabinet.

“I should have ignored you,” he said. “I should have come anyway. I should have been there.”

The grief in the room was old enough to have changed shape, no longer the raw thing from the day of the call, hardened now into something with a direction to it.

He looked at the photograph of Lucia he’d placed beside Marco’s.

A knock. Ruth came in quietly, the way she came into rooms when she could tell he was somewhere private. She set a small bunch of flowers beside Marco’s photograph.

“Still thinking about him?”

“Always.”

They stood together a moment.

“He deserved a life,” Marcus said.

11:30 Sat, Aug 1

Chapter 336

“She took that from him,” Ruth said.

…

He didn’t answer right away. Then, “She answers for it.”

Ruth left.

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Marcus picked up the photograph of their mother from the back of the cabinet and kissed it gently, holding it in both hands.

“I couldn’t save him,” he said. “I couldn’t save Marco.”

He set it beside the childhood photograph of two identical boys squinting into the sun and looked at their faces, both of them, his and his brother’s.

“But I swear,” he said, “she will answer for every month I’ve spent without him.”

He closed the cabinet.

Behind the glass, two ten year old boys were still smiling into the summer sun.

One had grown old.

The other never would.

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