Reinventing Rachel by Alison Strobel Read Free Book Online

greeting. “It was totally one of those super-sucky days that just would not end! So what’s the story—you in for Vegas?”
    “Patrick’s been cheating on me.” The statement renewed the tears, and she began to cry.
    “What?” Daphne fell silent as Rachel struggled to get her tears under control, then let out a stream of insults broken up with words of empathy and condolence. “I’m in shock,” she said at the end. “And if I’m in shock, I can’t imagine what you’re feeling.”
    Rachel sucked in giant gulps of air, trying to get a hold of herself. “I just don’t understand,” she said between hiccups. “I don’t understand why God is doing this to me. I don’t understand what I did wrong.”
    “It’s not you, it’s not God—it’s life. C’est la vie. Things are great sometimes, and other times they’re awful. It’s just … the balance of the universe. A little hell here, a little heaven there, you know? I doubt it’s a matter of God doing anything to you—why would he? What did you ever do to deserve it?”
    They were the very questions Rachel had been asking herself in the back of her frazzled mind. What happened to “I’ll hold you in the palm of My hand?” There was no hand there now, no safety net, and she was in free fall. The God she’d grown up serving didn’t do this to the people who loved and obeyed him like she did. At least, she never thought he did.
    But if he did—how dare he?
    “Listen, Rachel—I’ll totally understand if you don’t want to come to Vegas, given everything that’s going on. But I think it would be good for you to get away from there for a couple days. You need space to breathe and recover. What do you think?”
    Think? Rachel couldn’t think. Her decision-making ability was shot. “If you think I should …”
    “I do.”
    “All right then.” She sniffed. “See you in Vegas.”
    Rachel dragged herself to bed after hanging up the phone, and tumbled fully clothed onto the mattress. In her despair she forgot to set her alarm before finally falling asleep, and when the phone rang at six-thirty the next morning she was so groggy she almost didn’t answer. Her boss’s voice on the other line brought her fully awake, however, and after they hung up she scrambled to get dressed and out the door.
    Idiot, idiot, idiot. In her haste she’d left her makeup bag on the kitchen table, so she had no way to fix the bags beneath her puffy eyes. Her embarrassment over her appearance compounded the embarrassment over being so late to work. Good luck getting that time off for Vegas now.
    “Sorry,” she said as she jogged into the coffee shop and threw her cardigan into the closet. “Put me to work. What should I do?”
    Roy pointed to the stock room. “Help Cora with inventory. We need to figure out what needs to be replaced.”
    She nodded to her boss but groaned inside. Cora was a fellow Beach Cities Church attendee and the last employee Rachel wanted to work with today. She headed to the stock room and noticed the floor was still slick in some areas, and the bottom three inches of everything was soggy and warped.
    “This is so icky,” Cora said when Rachel knelt beside her to wrestle a waterlogged box from beneath the counter. Then she got a good look at Rachel’s face and frowned. “What’s wrong?”
    “I look that bad, huh?”
    “Sorry, but yes, you do.” They unpacked the box of napkins and began inspecting the individually-wrapped packs for damage. “Bad night?”
    “Well … yes. But I forgot to set my alarm before I fell asleep. Roy woke me up when he called.”
    “Oh no. You poor thing. Why the bad night? Did something happen?”
    Rachel couldn’t stop the bitter snort that escaped her nose. “A few somethings, yeah.”
    “Do you need to talk about it?”
    “No.” She sighed. “Actually, yes, I do, but I can’t guarantee I won’t fall apart.”
    Cora nodded to the counter full of napkins. “Plenty of tissues here if you need