In the meantime, upon hearing Otis say that he was going to give Penelope a call, upon hearing those simple words spoken so calmly and so directly without any hesitation or shame, Megan felt something inside her snap in a way she had not anticipated, something that had been sitting quietly beneath her confusion and doubt all evening but had now, with those few words, broken loose and flooded through her with a force she could barely contain, because this was no longer abstract tension or vague suspicion or even private frustration, this was jealousy, raw and undeniable and impossible to dress up as anything else, and it burned through her chest with a heat that made her hands tighten into fists at her sides even as she tried desperately to keep her face from betraying the full extent of what she felt.Melissa, standing beside her, was not faring much better, though her reaction took a different shape entirely, less jealousy and more pure shock, the kind of shock that comes when reality

At that moment in time, without wasting another second, without allowing the weight of Megan's words to settle into the space between them or permitting the threat she had just made to linger unchallenged in the air, Otis responded with the kind of calm that could only belong to someone who had either stopped caring entirely or had never been worried in the first place, and when he spoke, his voice was so even, so unbothered, so stripped of defensiveness or anger or fear, that it almost sounded like he was discussing the weather rather than the dissolution of his own marriage."Well," he said, looking at Megan with an expression that gave nothing away, "I'll be waiting for the time in which the divorce is going to come in. Yes, I'll be waiting. But for now, since I'm certain that the divorce is not going to come any moment soon, since I'm certain that the divorce is not even going to arrive as quickly as you seem to think it will, that simply means I actually have nothing to worry abou

So at that moment in time, without wasting another second and without allowing the skepticism written all over James's face to go unanswered or unchallenged, Otis drew himself up quietly and looked directly at the man standing before him, and when he spoke, his voice carried the kind of measured calm that belonged not to someone who had nothing to prove but to someone who had long since stopped feeling the need to prove anything to anyone, and yet who still understood, with deep and practiced patience, that there were moments when a few carefully chosen words could accomplish what an argument never could."It seems you are Mr. James," Otis said, his tone even, almost conversational, as though they were meeting under entirely ordinary circumstances rather than at the door of a house where a sick child was waiting and a grown man was standing guard with his doubts like a locked gate, "and you are definitely Mr. Ben's friend, so let me just go straight to the point without wasting any mo