Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 344

Chapter 344

The red light above the ICU door stayed on.

P:

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Lucia had stopped trying to get inside. Now she stood with both hands flat against the glass, watching the curtain around Lucas’s bed. She tracked every shadow behind it, trying to guess if he was still fighting.

Alexander stood behind her, arms around her. Not holding her back. Just there.

She kept saying please. Not to anyone. Just the word, sent toward the glass and whatever was happening on the other side of it.

Monica gripped Alexander’s hand the way small children grab for something solid when the world stops making sense. He held on without looking down. His eyes stayed on the curtain too.

An hour passed. Maybe longer. Hospital corridors keep their own time.

Monica turned to him.

“Is Lucas going to die?”

Alexander dropped to his knees in front of her. Not because his legs gave out. Because she needed him at eye level.

His eyes were red. He hadn’t let himself cry, not fully, not with people watching him to be steady. But he didn’t hide the red either.

“No,” he said.

She stared at him.

“Your brother is not giving up,” he said. “I know him. Two nights ago he walked out of that kitchen and told us not to let her win. He went outside to protect you. That’s not a man who quits.” He cupped her face in his hands. “He’s too stubborn to leave this family.”

Monica broke down. He pulled her against his chest and looked back at the glass, jaw tight, eyes shut.

Down the corridor, Ria stood facing the wall. Her shoulders jumped once, then went still. She’d decided that if she was going to fall apart, she’d do it quietly, without asking anyone to carry it with her.

Lena reached over and touched her arm. Neither said a word.

Three hours went by. Shift change came and went at the nurses’ station. The coffee someone had set on the chair beside Lucia turned cold, untouched. Nobody left. Nobody mentioned food. Hunger and rest had been put on hold, the way they always were in corridors like this one.

Lucia kept talking to the glass. She told Lucas his sisters needed him. She told him she needed him. She told him the children he hadn’t met yet were waiting to know their big brother. She told him she hadn’t rebuilt this much of her life just to stand in a hospital hallway without him.

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14:33 Fri, Aug 7

RISE OF THE FORMIDABLE EX WIFE

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Alexander stayed at her side the whole time, catching her elbow whenever her legs threatened to give.

The door opened.

The doctor stepped out. His scrubs showed the night’s work. His face showed a hard room he’d walked out of without losing.

The family closed around him before he’d taken three steps.

“The seizure came from the brain trauma,” he said. “The swelling raised the pressure and triggered it.” He looked at each of them in turn. “For a while, we nearly lost him.”

Lucia’s hand found Alexander’s arm and stayed there.

“We stabilized him,” the doctor said.

Monica made a small, cracked sound. Ria shut her eyes. Lena pressed a hand over her mouth. Alexander’s head dropped, then lifted again.

“He’s still in a coma,” the doctor said.

The relief that had come with stabilized had already known this part was coming.

“His condition is still critical. I can’t tell you when he’ll wake up, or if. Could be tomorrow. Could be days. Sometimes longer, with an injury this bad.” He paused. “I wish I had a cleaner answer for you.”

“But he’s alive,” Lucia said.

“He’s alive,” the doctor said. “Yes.”

She nodded and turned back to the glass.

The doctor didn’t leave. He looked down at the tablet in his hand, at the flag the nurses had put on Lucia’s file when she arrived.

“Mrs. Kane,” he said.

She turned.

“You’re pregnant,” he said. “Tonight’s stress, no food, no rest, all of it. Your baby is my patient too.” He kept his voice gentle, but he didn’t soften the words enough to let her brush past them. “You need to eat. You need to

sit.”

“My son is in that room.”

“I know,” he said. “And he needs a mother who took care of herself while she waited for him.” He paused. “I’ll have the nurses come get you the second anything changes. The second. You won’t miss it.”

Lucia looked at him, then at Alexander.

“I’m staying,” she said.

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14:33 Fri, Aug 7

RISE OF THE FORMIDABLE EX WIFE

The doctor nodded and walked away.

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Alexander didn’t argue. He pulled two chairs to the window, sat beside her, and put his arm around her shoulders. Together they watched the curtain.

The rain had stopped by the time Marcus reached the hospital.

He parked alone, in the darkest corner of the lot, and sat in the car for a while before he made himself get out.

He walked toward the building and looked up at the lit windows of the ICU wing, at the shapes moving behind them.

He found the window. He found the family.

Lucia with her palm pressed to the glass. Alexander beside her. The girls arranged around them the way people arrange themselves after too many hours in one hallway, finding the only positions their bodies could

still hold.

Marcus watched from the lot.

He’d seen photographs. Ruth had made sure of that. Months of photographs.

Seeing them like this was different.

He couldn’t hear what Lucia was saying to the glass, but he didn’t need to. He’d watched his own mother do the same thing once, in a cold hospital with corridors just as long, back when he was the one behind the glass.

He looked for Lucas and couldn’t see him past the curtain.

He watched Monica instead. He’d seen Lucas once before, days ago, trailing Ruth from a distance, and something in him had cracked open at the sight. Marco’s son. Marco’s eyes. The same tilt of the head Marco used to have when something held his full attention.

He’d been trying to protect that boy.

And Ruth had sent a car for him yesterday anyway.

Marcus walked toward the entrance and through the automatic doors. He reached the corridor and stopped.

Through the glass he could see them clearly now. Lucia’s face, worn down to the point where tears looked less like grief and more like her natural state.

He should walk through. He should stand with his brother’s children and be the man Marco would have wanted him to be tonight.

He couldn’t make his feet move.

He had no right to that hallway. He’d spent months helping build the thing that put Lucas in that bed. Comfort wasn’t his to offer.

He stepped back outside.

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14:34 Fri, Aug 7

RISE OF THE FORMIDABLE EX WIFE

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His phone rang. Sharon his wife, with the small heart she’d added next to her name when she set up his new phone.

He answered.

“Hi,” she said, warm and a little tired, the sound of a house that kept running while he stood in a wet parking lot.

“Hi,” he said.

“How are you?”

“I’m alright.”

A small voice rose up behind hers.

“Daddy!”

“Hey, champ.”

“I miss you,” Zion said. “When are you coming home?”

Marcus turned away from the entrance and pressed a hand over his eyes. Rain still dripped from the awning above the doors, the only sound besides his son’s voice.

“Soon,” he said.

“Promise?”

He looked up at the ICU windows.

“I promise.”

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