Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 338

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Lucia had been folding small things for the past hour, onesies and sleep suits and the tiny socks that always lost their pairs. Her hands worked without needing much from her mind, which left her mind somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere else meant the kitchen. Alexander’s voice.

I need you to decide what you actually believe. Not what you know. What you

believe.

She folded a sleep suit with a small rabbit stitched on the chest and sat with the question he’d left behind.

She already knew the answer. Had known it before he even asked. She believed him, had believed him every day since Ruth walked through the front door, through every argument and every piece of planted evidence and every morning watching the damage spread. She believed him the way you believe something you’ve been given years of reason to believe.

What she’d allowed was for fear to grow loud enough to drown that out.

A soft knock.

“Mum?”

“Come in.”

Lucas came through the door and shut it quietly behind him, the same careful quiet he’d been carrying for weeks. Something in the way they looked at each other said they’d both been holding things they weren’t ready to put down.

He sat beside her on the small bench.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said.

“For what?”

“For keeping things from you. For weeks.” He stared at the floor between his feet.

She reached over and touched the side of his face, the way she’d done since he was small, when the touch said everything words couldn’t.

“I knew you were,” she said. “I didn’t know why. I decided to wait until you were ready.”

He let out a breath.

“It started with a photograph,” he said.

A pause.

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Chapter 338

“Then Monica and I searched Ruth’s room.”

Another pause.

“Mum. She has a diary.”

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Lucia had stopped folding. She listened the way you listen to something you need to fully take in, no interruptions, nothing decided yet on her face.

“You searched her room,” she said.

“I know it was wrong,” Lucas said. “But I already knew something was very wrong. I couldn’t leave it alone.”

He reached into his backpack and set the diary on the bench between them.

“I took this. I know I shouldn’t have. But I need you to see it.”

He opened the cover to the first page and held it toward her without saying anything.

Lucia read the two lines written in dark ink, in Ruth’s careful hand. Read them again. Closed the diary.

Her hands weren’t steady when she set it down.

“She came here for me,” she said.

Lucas nodded.

“There’s more I still need to prove,” he said. “I can’t tell you all of it yet. Not until I’m certain. But I needed you to see that page first, because you needed to know this was never about Dad.”

She studied him and felt the edge of what he was still holding back, a line drawn around the part he wasn’t ready to hand over. She’d been a mother long enough to know the difference between a secret kept from her and a secret kept for her.

She let it go.

“I need to say something to you,” Lucas said.

She waited.

“Dad loves you.” His voice went rough with the effort of saying it plainly. “I’ve watched him. Not just when he knows someone’s looking. I’ve seen him when he thinks the house is empty, when he’s just himself in a room by accident.” He stopped. “He loves you the same when nobody’s watching as when everyone is. I’ve watched that not change for months.”

Her eyes filled.

“Please don’t let her do it,” he said, his voice cracking once before it steadied. “Please don’t let Ruth break this family. We’ve been through too much. You have. And Dad is innocent, and we’re going to prove it, and I need you to still be here when we do.”

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Chapter 338

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She pulled him into her arms, and he let himself be held, something he’d stopped letting happen the way teenagers stop letting themselves be held, and the fact that he let her now told her more about what the weeks had cost him than any words could have.

She held on a long time.

“You sound exactly like your father,” she said, once she could say it steady.

He laughed, a real one. “Good. I’ve always wanted to.”

She pulled back. “Thank you. For doing what you did. For protecting us when I was too busy holding myself together to see what was happening from the inside.”

He nodded. She wiped her face and stood, and went to Alexander’s study.

The door was closed, light showing underneath it. She knocked once and opened it.

He looked up from his desk, the last of his focus shifting fully onto her.

She crossed the room and didn’t stop until her arms were around him, and he went still a moment before holding on, no performance in it at all.

They stayed like that.

“Are we alright?” he said, against her hair.

“We’re going to be.”

She pulled back. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.”

“I do. I knew the truth the whole time. I let everything else get loud enough to drown it out. That’s not your fault. That’s mine.” She held his eyes. “I let someone else’s lies get louder than my faith in us.”

He kissed her forehead. “We’ll get through this.”

“Together.”

From the upper landing, Ruth watched.

She’d come upstairs to avoid the kitchen, the route taking her past the view down into the hallway outside Alexander’s study, and she’d seen the door open and Lucia walk through it.

She’d expected the same thing she’d seen for hours, two people in the same space who had stopped finding easy ways toward each other.

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