Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 343

Chapter 343

Lucia was still looking at the screen.

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Her thumb kept moving across the photograph, zooming in on the face, pulling back, zooming in again, as though the image would eventually resolve into something different from what it was showing her if she looked at it enough times and from enough angles.

“No,” she said. Barely a sound. “Marco.”

She touched the face on the screen.

She had touched that face ten thousand times. She knew the weight of that jaw in her hands and the way those eyes moved when he was thinking about something he had not yet decided whether to say and the angle of the nose from every direction it could be photographed from.

“How,” she said.

Alexander was beside her and he was not steadier than she was. He was holding himself upright by the same mechanism she was using, which was the sheer necessity of having to do it.

“He’s alive,” Alexander said.

She turned.

“We buried him,” she said. “Alexander. We were there. We stood at that grave.”

“I know,” he said. “Tell me what I’m looking at, then. Tell me how this man has his face.”

She looked at the photograph again.

The eyes.

The jawline.

The specific quality of the expression in the way Marco had always looked when he was angry about something and was managing it through stillness rather than through volume.

She shook her head.

Ria looked at Monica.

Monica looked at Lena.

Something passed between the three of them that was not quite communication but was the specific frequency of people who had been sharing a secret for weeks and had just reached the moment when carrying it alone was no longer possible.

Lena said quietly: “It’s time.”

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RISE OF THE FORMIDABLE EX WIFE

Ria stepped forward.

“Dad.”

Alexander looked at her.

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The expression on her face produced in him the attention of a parent who has registered that a child is about to say something significant.

“There’s something you didn’t know,” Ria said. “Something we found. We were going to tell you when we had everything. But you need to know this part now.”

Lucia was looking at her.

Something in her daughter’s face made the cold feeling in her chest locate itself more precisely.

“That man in the photograph,” Ria said, “is not our dad.”

Lucia’s reaction arrived before Ria finished the sentence.

“How can he not be?” she said. “He has…”

“Because our dad had a twin brother,” Ria said.

The space around those words went completely still.

Lucia looked at Ria.

She looked at her daughter’s face for a long time.

“What,” she said.

“His name is Marcus,” Ria said. “He was adopted when they were young children. They grew up apart. The adoption agreement required him to stay away from the family.” She kept her voice steady because someone needed to keep their voice steady and Lucas was in the room behind the glass and Ria had made the decision on his behalf. “He’s been alive the whole time.”

Lucia shook her head.

The movement was not a refusal. It was the body’s response to being handed something too heavy.

“Marco never had a brother,” she said.

“He did,” Ria said.

“I was married to that man for years,” Lucia said. Her voice had developed a quality it had not had before, something just underneath the surface of it that was the beginning of a grief that had not yet found its name. “I knew him. I thought I knew every part of him.”

Nobody answered.

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Alexander had been standing slightly apart and listening with the focused attention of a man who was taking everything in and filing it into the shape of what had been happening.

“That’s why Ruth works with him,” he said, to himself as much as to anyone. “She knew Marco. She worked for him. She would have known about a twin.” He pressed his fist against his mouth briefly. “That’s why she knew so much. The schedules, the access, the people who could be reached. It all came through Marco’s network.” He looked at Lucia. “And Marcus blames you for Marco’s death.”

Lucia was not looking at him.

She was looking at the ICU window.

At the form of her son motionless on the other side of the glass.

She stood.

“I’m going to find him,” she said.

Alexander stepped into her path.

She stopped.

“Move,” she said.

“No,” he said.

“He has answers. He has years of answers. He has answers about Marco and about the twins and about why my son is in that room right now.”

“I know,” Alexander said. “Which is exactly why you cannot go to him tonight.”

She tried to go around him.

He moved with her.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Right now, Marcus does not know what we know. He has been operating under the assumption that the family he is targeting is still unaware of who he is. The moment he understands that we’ve identified him, he and Ruth disappear and take every piece of evidence with them and we have nothing.” He held her eyes. “We cannot afford that. Lucas cannot afford that. Whatever Marcus knows about who sent that vehicle, whatever proof still exists, it requires Marcus to believe he is still hidden.”

She breathed.

She breathed again.

“You’re right,” she said finally.

She did not look as though she believed she was doing the right thing.

Alexander was already on his phone.

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“Double the surveillance,” he said, when his assistant picked up. “Marcus and Ruth. Every phone, every financial transaction, every meeting, every contact. Nobody loses sight of either of them.” He paused. “I want Marcus’s complete history. Birth records. Medical. Immigration. Every business he has been attached to. Every person he has known.”

He ended the call.

The family stood together in the corridor outside the ICU.

Lucia leaned against Alexander.

“I don’t know who my ex husband was anymore,” she said. The words came out quietly and completely, with the exhaustion of someone who has been holding a version of the past that just changed shape permanently.

He put his arm around her.

“We’ll find every answer,” he said. “All of it.”

The girls came closer.

Ria’s hand on Lucia’s back. Lena beside Ria. Monica on the other side of Alexander.

For one moment the five of them stood in the hospital corridor outside the window where Lucas lay, and the five of them were a family gathered around the space where the sixth member had been placed temporarily, and the holding was real.

The monitor started.

One sharp high sound.

Everyone turned.

Another sound.

Another.

The rhythm changed through the glass, the specific change of a machine going from recording something stable to recording something urgent, and Lucia’s hand went to the glass and a nurse inside moved fast toward the bed.

A second nurse hit a call button.

The alarms escalated.

The speed of the beeping became something that had no good meaning in any hospital corridor at any hour.

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