An Amish Christmas by Cynthia Keller Read Free Book Online

we might as well do it as a team.”
    “James, we’re not discussing where to go on vacation or whether the kids should take Spanish or French. We’re discussing how you deceived me and what you’ve done to the whole family. We’re talking about whether I’m leaving you.”
    He held up a hand and spoke soothingly. “I know you’re angry now, Meg—”
    “Don’t patronize me.” Her tone was icy. “I feel like such a fool, being all chipper to try and cheer you up, feeling sorry foryou while you were busy nursing your wounded pride in coffee shops. You know, if we had worked as a ‘team,’ as you put it, when you lost your job,
that
might have been helpful. I never would have let you risk everything we had, no matter how fantastic the deal was.” She stood. “True, you were the one with the high-powered job, the one who made all the money. You were the important one. Nothing I did mattered much. Raising the kids, running our lives—stupid stuff, I guess. Even so, couldn’t you have thrown me a bone? Given me a hint what you were going to do?” She stooped to retrieve her coffee cup. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t bear to look at you another minute. We’ll have to sit down and go over some things later. Like when we have to get out of the house. And where on earth we’re going to go.”
    James’s tone was angry. “Don’t twist everything around. I was only trying to spare you and the kids.”
    “If things had gone your way, that would have been fine. I’d never have been the wiser. It simply didn’t occur to you that something might go wrong, did it?” She paused. “Maybe having such a high-powered job isn’t always a good thing. The adrenaline of all that risk-taking, the thrill of so much money. It can lead to some pretty terrible consequences.”
    “You were perfectly happy to spend all that money, as I recall,” he said.
    She waited a moment to be sure she could sound calm. “Your nastiness aside, none of this is about money, don’t you see that? It’s about my never being able to trust you again. It’s about the fact that our marriage is a big fraud because you’re inone marriage, and I’m apparently in another. The person I thought you were would never put his family at risk.”
    Looking exhausted, he closed his eyes. “I’m the same person I always was.”
    “Well, James, that kind of makes it worse, you know? That means I never really understood what kind of person you were.”
    He looked at her, his gaze hard. “Could we stop all this, please? We have to make some decisions, and we don’t have time for you to berate me for hours. What’s done is done. We need to move forward.”
    Her eyes widened. “Wait—you get to do something this terrible, and then you get to dictate how much I can say about it? I’m
annoying
you?” Before he could reply, she turned and walked back to the house, trying to stifle her rage. She refilled her cup in the kitchen and sat down at her desk, her mind racing. There were phone calls to make and lists to compile, lists of awful and humiliating things to do. If only I could go back to my silly to-do lists in my pink leather book, she thought. I’d never complain about it again.
    She rummaged through the filing cabinet beneath the desk to assemble an armload of files containing unpaid bills and legal documents. Setting them down, she grabbed a legal pad and a pen. She wrote “cancel” on the top left of the page and started adding whatever came to mind. Cable, newspapers, magazines, cleaning service. Credit cards. She had to find some way to pay off the balances, which were high, but to keep the cards in case they got desperate.
    They also owed money at several local shops, many wherethey knew the owners personally. It wasn’t that they were in any great debt to these shops, but Meg typically waited to pay the bills until she had accumulated two or three months’ worth. She recalled all the times Mr. Collins at the pharmacy had advised her