Read Online Reconciled for Easter by Noelle Adams - Free Book Online Page A

had gone by, but she was once again muttering under her breath, “Please be okay, please be okay with it.”
    She didn’t hear a response, but she didn’t wait for one. She just opened the door. It was a room in her house. She was allowed to enter without permission.
    Thomas blinked up at her from the book he’d been pouring over. He still spent most of his downtime from the hospital studying. “What?”
    “I wanted to talk to you, if that’s allowed.” Her tone might have been a little snippy, but she was so, so tired of waiting for spare moments to talk to her own husband. Over the years, it had just gotten worse.
    “About what?”
    “I was looking around at jobs,” she began, going into her prepared speech.
    “For me?” he interrupted.
    She stiffened in annoyance. “For me .”
    This seemed to get his attention. He put down his book and straightened his shoulders. “Why are you looking for a job?”
    “Why shouldn’t I look for a job? I’ve got two Master’s degrees now, and I’ve done exactly nothing with them. Why shouldn’t I look around and see if there’s something I’d be good at, work that could make me happy.”
    Something went cold on his face. She saw it happen the way she’d seen it happen dozens of times before—whenever she tried to talk to him about how she’d changed, matured, grown out of the insecure girl he had married. “We don’t know where we’ll be next year.”
    “I know that, but it can’t hurt to look around. There aren’t that many jobs I can do that use my degrees.” She cleared her throat, her heart dropping heavily as she saw nothing of kindness or understanding in his expression. “It’s not like I have to work, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t look around, just in case it works out. Anyway, I found this. It looks perfect for us.”
    She handed him the job ad she’d printed off and had been praying over for a week now.
    He accepted the wrinkled page on the open position at Milbourne House in the mountains of North Carolina and stared down at it for far longer than it would take him to read.
    Finally, she couldn’t stand it any longer. “That’s near Willow Park,” she said.
    “I see that.” He still hadn’t looked up from the page.
    “We always talked about moving back to that area, since your family is there and everything, so I noticed it right away. You could easily get a job at a hospital nearby, so I thought it might be worth…worth looking into. Just to consider.”
    He wasn’t happy. She could tell he wasn’t happy from the lines of his face, the posture of his shoulders, the tension in the air.
    He wasn’t happy at all.
    “What about Mia?” he asked, finally looking up to meet her eyes.
    “What about Mia?”
    “You’re planning to take this job and just leave her—”
    “I’m thinking of getting a job—not abandoning our child on the street. Why shouldn’t I considering getting a job I’d be good at, one I’d enjoy?” She felt sick and put a hand on her belly. She was angry and terrified and hurt and betrayed and uncertain, the conflicting feelings all tightening into a hard knot.
    “Of course, you can consider getting a job,” Thomas said at last, the tension on his face relaxing but not into anything like peace or acceptance. It was that cool, superior irony she disliked more than any of his other expressions. “You know perfectly well I’m okay with that. But it seems like the priority should be our family—and not some fantasy job to fulfill your own personal dreams. So maybe you should just hold off and see where we end up, and then start looking for a job that works out with our whole situation.”
    She stared at him, experiencing a hot and familiar wave of shame. He thought she was being selfish—thinking of herself at the expense of their family. And maybe he was right.
    She’d spent most of her life assuming she wouldn’t work outside of the home. It was the lifestyle she’d been raised to believe was the