The Amazing Otis Vale

Chapter 10

She gestured toward his mother with a brief, dismissive lift of her chin. 

“Doesn't look like a woman whose surgery was going to determine whether she lived or died. Looks like a woman who just had a nice rest.”

“He is a liar and a thief,” Diane agreed, and the way she said it had a finality to it, the kind of tone that is designed to close a door.

Otis mother had gone very still on the step. The warmth had drained out of her expression slowly, replaced by something more careful, more watchful, the look of a woman recalibrating what she is seeing.

“I don't understand,” she said quietly. 

“I was  sick. I  was very sick tonight. Otis saved me, he—”

“Oh, so now he's a doctor,” Cara said, and the laugh that came with it was short and thin. “He can barely hold down a job and now he treats patients. Is that what we're saying?”

“He saved my life tonight,” Otis's mother said, and her voice was still controlled but something had entered it, something with edges. 

“I don't know everything that happened. But I know my son.”

“Your son,” Diane said, and now she looked at Otis mother directly for the first time, fully, with the specific regard of a woman looking at something she considers significantly beneath her, “is a parasite. He has always been a parasite. He attached himself to my daughter when she was vulnerable and sick and he has been feeding off this family ever since. And the fact that you are standing here right now, healthy, when he was in my sitting room two hours ago telling us you were at death's door, tells me everything I need to know about the kind of man your son is.”

“You should be ashamed,” Cara added, looking at Otis's mother now too, her voice dropping into something softer and more pointed. “Raising something like him.”

Otis mother's chin came up.

It was a small movement. Barely visible. But Emty saw it.

“I raised my son properly,” she said, and her voice was very quiet now, the specific quiet of a woman who is done being gracious and has not yet decided what she is replacing it with. 

“And whatever you think of him, you have no right to speak about him that way to his mother's face.”

Diane's eyes narrowed. 

“I have every right to say whatever I please to whoever I please, particularly when the person in question's son came into my home and tried to extort money from my family using a fabricated medical emergency.”

“It was not fabricated,” Otis said.

“We have nothing to say to you,” Cara said immediately.

“Then don't say anything,” Otis uttered. “But stop talking to her.”

“Or what?” Diane responded. She took a single step forward, not toward Otis but toward his mother. 

“Your son is a divorced man as of tonight. Did you know that? Did he tell you? He signed the papers himself. He has no connection to this family. He has no claim on anything. He is nothing, and the apple does not fall far from the tree, so I have to say, standing here looking at the two of you—”

“That is enough,” Otis said.

“—I am not remotely surprised that he turned out the way he did, because”

“I said that is enough.”

“—because look at what made him,” Diane finished, and she looked directly at his mother with something that was not quite a smile and was far worse than a sneer. 

“Honestly. Look at it.”

His mother tried to step forward. Not aggressively. She was trying to close the distance, trying to reach for some version of this conversation that could still be salvaged, because that was who she was, who she had always been, a woman who believed things could be talked through if you were just willing to keep trying.

Diane's hand came up.

The slap was open-palmed and hard and landed across his mother's face with a sound that cut through the night air like something snapping.

His mother's head turned with the force of it. She grabbed the railing at the side of the steps to keep her balance, one hand pressed to her cheek, and for a moment she just stood there, the shock of it moving across her face before the pain registered.

“How dare you,” Diane said, and her voice was shaking slightly now, not with remorse but with the specific fury of a person who has decided the violence was justified before they committed it. 

“How dare you speak to me. You should have stayed in that bed. You should have stayed sick. You have no reason to be standing here, you have no reason to be breathing air that decent people breathe, and you absolutely do not get to exchange words with me.”

At that moment Otis was not standing where he had been standing.

He was not on the step, he was not at his mother's side.

He was in front of Diane Harrington, and his hand was around her throat, and she was no longer touching the ground.

It had happened in the space between one breath and the next, the flash step moving him across the distance before his mind had fully issued the instruction, and now he was standing with his feet planted on the wet pavement in front of the hospital steps, his arm extended, Diane's feet dangling two inches above the ground, his grip around her neck firm and absolute and completely without effort.

He looked at her.

His eyes, in the yellow glow of the hospital entrance lights, were not the eyes she remembered from the sitting room of her mansion. They were not the eyes of the man who had stood in the rain and asked for help and swallowed everything she gave him and stayed quiet.

They were red and gold, burning low and steady like coals that have been sitting long enough to reach their full heat.

“You want to die.”