Chapter 315 If you can turn me into a pig, then sure

Chapter 315 If you can turn me into a pig, then sure
Cassie hoped Giselle wouldn’t fall for it. Her mouth curved into a smile. "And are you thinking about giving him a second chance?"

Giselle looked at her for a long, measured moment, as though genuinely turning the question over before she answered. "If you can turn me into a pig," she said pleasantly, "then sure. I'll give him a second chance. After all, only pigs can eat anything. Including their own vomit."

The room came apart.

Laughter rolled through it in a wave, full and unrestrained, the kind that catches people mid-breath and doesn't let go for a moment.

From somewhere in the middle of it, Asher's voice surfaced, appreciative and unhurried. "Sharp tongue," he said, the admiration in it entirely genuine. "Interesting."

He had noticed Giselle from the moment she walked in, had clocked her with that instinctive, quiet attention he gave to things that interested him.

But even as the thought was still forming, he watched her eyes travel across the room and land, with calm and unmistakable intent, on Frederick. Not curious. Not casual. Something more considered than that.

Asher redirected his gaze without making a thing of it and found something else to look at.

Giselle, for her part, frowned slightly, not with hostility, just with the mild puzzlement of someone encountering a face they don't have a file for yet.

The man who had spoken looked decent enough, and the fact that Cassie had let him in here, to something this personal, this close-knit, was its own kind of reference. She filed him away and moved on.

Her eyes found Frederick again, the third time now, and she let herself ask it. "Is that your ex-husband?"

Cassie had mentioned it before, at some point, the fact that Franklin's twin brother was the man she'd been married to. There wasn't much room for doubt when you put the two of them in the same room and looked between them.

"He is," Cassie confirmed, and the smile she offered with it was the kind that's tidy and contained and doesn't invite a lot of follow-up.

The atmosphere in the room adjusted. Not dramatically, as nobody stood up or made a scene, but the temperature changed in that subtle, communal way it does when a group of people who care about someone all receive the same piece of information at the same moment and quietly form their own opinions about it.

Frederick noticed but didn’t react. Franklin did. He leaned forward just slightly and let his voice carry enough to land gently across the room without demanding the floor.

"Everyone, my twin brother is a changed man. He's just here for his daughter now. So please be kind to him."

"You don't have to do that." Frederick's voice was even. Unhurried. He was looking down at the wine glass in his hand, turning it slightly, and when he looked up there was nothing defensive in his expression, just a clear, settled honesty.

"I don't need anyone to manage what people think of me. Whatever they feel, I've earned it."

The room sat with that for a moment.

"What matters is change." Giselle's voice came in without hesitation, direct and clean. "If you've actually changed, then nobody in this room has any business judging you for what came before."

Frederick looked at her, and something passed across his face, not quite gratitude, or surprise, but something quieter than either of those things.

He gave a single, unhurried nod, and said nothing, and somehow that said more than anything he could have added.

The moment passed naturally, the way good moments do, and the room breathed again.

"Ocean and I are official." Evan's voice came up bright and clear, and he raised Ocean's hand as he said it, the ring on her finger catching the light, and making several people in the room inhale quietly and then smile.

Ocean looked like she wanted to disappear into the sofa cushions in the best possible way, her expression caught somewhere between thrilled and overwhelmed and deeply, privately happy.

Jonathan smiled from across the room, and then straightened just slightly with the energy of a man who has been waiting for his own moment. "Victoria and I are together too," he said, simply and without flourish, though the satisfaction in his voice was unmistakable.

The room was still processing that when Asher's voice came in from the left, unhurried and carrying an almost theatrical courtesy that the room hadn't quite seen coming.

"Do I have permission," he said, in a tone that was entirely too composed for what he was actually asking, "to pursue the woman sitting on my left?"

Every head in the room turned.

Thelma sat there with her drink halfway to her lips, her eyes wide, her entire body momentarily suspended in the specific paralysis of someone who had absolutely not prepared themselves for their name, or rather, their location to be called out in front of a full room of people.

She looked like she had several responses forming at once and couldn't decide which one to let out first.