I Was His Wife, Then His Widow, Then No One's But My Own novel Chapter 86

The lounge remained dead silent for exactly three minutes.

Arthur brought his finger down hard on a specific number in the third row of the spreadsheet. "Your substituted variable here is fundamentally flawed."

He didn't miss a beat. "You inputted the wrong initial value, which caused every subsequent data point to offset by exactly 0.3 units. A fraction of a millimeter off, and the entire result falls apart."

He flipped the page, pointing to a set of curved graphs. "You're running this on live trial subjects now, which means this fluctuation is completely unacceptable. Technically, phase one shouldn't even show this kind of volatility, unless..."

He cut himself off mid-sentence, turning his head to shoot Xavier a wildly mocking grin. "Is this really the best your lab can do? Thank God my old mentor passed his true genius down to me. If he had left it to you, the whole field would have gone extinct by now."

Xavier raised his cane, aiming a whack at Arthur's shoulder. He swung high but brought it down soft, having no real intention of hitting him.

Arthur danced out of the way like an agile old monkey, his triumphant laughter echoing through the room. The contrast between this prankster and the hyper-focused genius who had just diagnosed a fatal mathematical error in three minutes was staggering.

Nora couldn't stop a small, relieved laugh from slipping out.

Arthur quickly shifted back into business mode. He stepped up to the desk, pulled a fountain pen from his pocket, and slashed a few aggressive lines across the data sheet. He circled the flawed variables and began scribbling a dense new formula in the margins.

"Recalculate it using this formula. Swap the initial variable for this exact value and run the simulation from scratch. You should have a clean, stable result within a week."

Nora stared at the fresh ink for a few seconds. She traced the mathematical logic from beginning to end, her brain rapidly rearranging the entire architectural framework of the trial. Just like that, the agonizing bug that had roadblocked her entire team for two months dissolved under a few strokes of a pen.

Her mouth parted in sheer shock. She snapped her head up to look at Arthur, her voice shaking with uncontainable gratitude. "Thank you. Thank you so much, Professor Caldwell."

Arthur waved her off dismissively. He capped his pen, slid it back into his pocket, let his gaze rest on her for a fraction of a second, and then looked away.

"Since you're a student of this stubborn old fool, I guess that makes you my student too. If you hit another wall, my door is open."

At the hospital.

After Felix checked in at the consultation room, Nora wandered toward the main lobby alone. As she passed the obstetrics and gynecology wing, her footsteps suddenly came to a dead halt.

At the far end of the corridor, Finnegan and Seraphina were walking out of a clinic room.

And in Seraphina's hand was an Ultrasound Report.

A deafening ringing exploded in Nora's ears, and all the oxygen seemed to vanish from the hallway.

They were having a baby?