LITMIR.BIZ

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calories away from diabetes.

      She chewed the pie slowly and sipped her milk at the kitchen table, fatigue making each bite an effort. Only four days to Christmas and she couldn’t have cared less. Max said it was her hormones acting up, but she didn’t think so. The malaise had started months before she got pregnant. It had begun when her best friend Karen Walters moved to the East Coast to open a seafood restaurant and she realized that she wasn’t free to do anything so daring. Her life map was drawn the day she married Max.

      Being his wife was what she’d wanted from the moment he’d sat next to her in the university cafeteria and started talking to her as if she was one of the pretty girls and not the plain one she knew herself to be. When he’d started seeking her out every day and then asking her to meet him after class, she’d felt such a glow inside. It wasn’t long before he’d consumed her every waking moment. She’d gone a little bit crazy. She knew that now.

      She looked around the renovated kitchen and studied the pine cupboards she’d chosen after visiting every kitchen store in the city. For something that had seemed so important to get right at the time, they hardly seemed worth the effort. She’d thought once that a welcoming home would make a difference, but Max wasn’t interested in the house or spending time in it. He had to be in the middle of things, wheeling and dealing. As long as he had access to the Internet, he could be anywhere: the office, a coffee shop, a bar. He used the house as a place to sleep and launch out of in the morning.

      She heard footsteps in the hallway, and as if he’d known she was thinking about him, Max appeared in the doorway. He was as dressed down as he ever got in a white undershirt and navy silk pajama bottoms. He ran a hand through his thick hair and grinned at her with sleepy eyes. Her heart still leapt at the sight of him and she wondered how her body could want him while her mind was revolted. Maybe it all came down to hormones as he’d suggested. He slid into the seat next to her and leaned his arm against hers. His smile was the same one that used to charm her. “Can’t sleep?”

      “No. Baby’s kicking. Plus I can’t stop wondering where Dad has gotten to. Did he say anything to you about taking off for the day?”

      “Not a word. His office door was closed when I got in so I just assumed he didn’t want to be bothered. I had no idea he wasn’t in there. Any apple pie left?”

      “In the fridge. Maybe I should call Hunter.”

      Max crossed the kitchen and opened the fridge door. He pulled out the pie plate, then cut a large slice and sat down next to her. “What good would that do? Hunter hasn’t spoken to your dad in months.”

      “I think Dad visited him lately. Besides, Hunter has a right to know our father’s gone missing.”

      “I sincerely doubt your brother’ll care all that much.”

      “I just can’t imagine Dad leaving Charlotte this close to Christmas. He told me once that if Laurel ever tried to divorce him, she’d never get custody of Charlotte.” She forced herself to stop talking. Max didn’t like it when she went on about her family.

      “Did he think Laurel would leave him?”

      “Dad was beginning to see her for the opportunist she is. It took long enough, but he was starting to make plans.”

      “Plans?”

      “When Daddy makes up his mind, he doesn’t wait for things to happen. He takes charge. It’s what makes him so good in the business world.”

      Max cut hard through the pie crust with the side of his fork before turning his head to look at her. He wasn’t smiling. “You call the way he manipulates people ‘taking charge?’”

      “What do you mean ‘manipulates?’”

      “Everyone your father comes into contact with either bends to his will or gets trampled on. Look at your mother. He discarded her like an old shoe as soon as he’d used up all her money. Now you tell me he was prepared to destroy Laurel.”

      “You make him sound like a monster. He’s not like that at all.”

      “What I can’t figure out is why you defend a man that everyone else in the world considers the biggest self-serving prick they ever had the bad fortune to come across. He has a way of making us all feel like something under his boot, you included. You take his bad qualities and make them seem like attributes.”

      Max threw the fork onto the table and pushed his chair back. “The way he treats you over and over and you take it like a lump. At least Hunter had the balls to get away. You don’t see any of this, do you? Oh, what’s the use. I’m going back to bed.”

      Long after Max left her, Geraldine sat at the kitchen table, immobilized by his words. The cold anger in his eyes was beyond anything she’d seen before. This was not the same man who’d courted her with flowers and undying love; the man she’d tied her future to, for better or worse. His ugly words replayed in her head, spreading like indelible ink through her brain. She knew now that she hadn’t been imagining his dislike.

      Maybe it would get better if he said what he was thinking instead of giving her the wall. That’s what she’d come to think of his silence — a thick wall that came up whenever he looked at her. She had to change whatever it was about herself that made him look at her that way. She just needed him to tell her what it was. She would change and make him love her again.

      God, she needed a drink. Not for the first time, she regretted having thrown out all the alcohol in the house when she’d found out she was pregnant. Cold turkey, they called it. She’d called it torture. All the nights sitting home alone before she was pregnant while Max worked, easing the time away with a bottle of wine that eventually stretched into two and a drinking time that started closer and closer to lunch. She’d hidden the empties from Max, driving to different liquor stores on Monday mornings to return them and replenish her stock for the week. She hadn’t had to hide her drunkenness since he usually turned up after she’d crawled into bed. That time seemed like a dream to her now. The evenings had been hazy and the mornings were just something to get through until she could pop the next cork. What she’d give for a cold glass of pinot now.

      She looked down at her swollen belly. Perhaps she was far enough along that a glass wouldn’t hurt the baby. It might even help them both relax. Having a drink might be a kindness. She pushed herself to her feet. First thing in the morning, she’d take a drive into the city and pick up a bottle. She’d tell the cashier it was a gift for a friend’s birthday. It wasn’t really that far off from the truth.

      5

      Thursday, December 22, 8:25 a.m.

      Rouleau leaned on the kitchen counter and looked out the window rimmed in frost. The darkness had lifted enough that he could see chickadees eating birdseed from the feeder that Frances had hung on a low hanging pine bough, now covered in a thick coat of snow. He’d kept the feeder replenished even after she left.

      He filled his mug from the coffee machine and took a sip while he looked at all the work he’d been putting off. When he and Frances had moved in five years ago, he’d planned to redo the kitchen and get rid of the blue cupboards and the green and grey tiled floor that puckered in places like a wizened apple. After that, he’d wanted to tackle the fake oak panelling in the front room and rip out the gold shag carpet and spring for new windows and doors. That had been the plan when he put in an offer on the fifties bungalow on a dead end street that ran alongside a bike path. So far all he’d accomplished was contracting out the new roof the summer before.

      He ran his hand along the jagged edge of the counter. Time to start getting organized and clean the place up. Might be a good idea if he decided to sell.

      He took a final swallow of coffee and dumped the rest into the sink, then grabbed his parka from the back of the kitchen chair on his way to the front door. He checked his cellphone as he walked. One message waiting. He punched in his password and listened to Vermette telling him to be in his office at nine for a briefing. No time to stop for breakfast like he’d planned.

      He

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