Shoe Addicts Anonymous Read Online Free PDF

mistake. Jim had done this to her deliberately.
    She thanked the woman, hung up the phone, and immediately dialed Jim’s private line.
    He answered on the fourth ring.
    “Why did you call my credit cards in as stolen?”
    “Who is this?”
    She could picture his smug, laughing face as he taunted her. “Why,” she repeated, her voice harder, “did you cancel all of my credit cards?”
    She heard his chair squeak as he shifted his weight. “Let me ask you something,” he said, his voice drenched with sarcasm. “Do you have anything you want to get off your chest? Maybe something you’ve been keeping from me?”
    Her stomach tightened like a slip knot.
    What had he found out?
    “What are you getting at, Jim?” Oh, God, there were so many things it could have been.
    “Oh, I think you know.”
    Too many possibilities came to mind. “No, Jim, I cannot think of anything I’ve done that was so bad it warranted you cutting me off and humiliating me in public. Did you think it would look good for you if your wife was trying to use bad credit cards?”
    “Not as good as—oh, I don’t know—a family .”
    Silence dropped between them like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing just out of reach.
    Jim was the first to take a swat at it.
    “Does that ring any bells?” His chair squeaked again, and she could see him shifting around, agitated now. “I thought we were trying to get pregnant. Turns out we were just”—she could almost see his meant-to-look-casual-but-actually-seething-underneath shrug—“fucking.”
    She grimaced at the way he spat the word. “You didn’t seem to be having such a bad time.”
    He wasn’t so easily distracted from his point. “You lied to me, Helene.”
    “About what, exactly?”
    “As if you don’t know.”
    “You’re insane,” she said, the best defense being a good—or at least a strongly convincing—offense.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Then tell me what you’re talking about.”
    She was half-ready to dismiss his accusations as smoke and mirrors when he said, “I found out about the pills.”
    Guilt and anger coursed through her veins. “What were you doing looking through my bedside table?”
    “Bedside table? I had to get a prescription filled at the G Street pharmacy today, and they asked if I was picking up your refill!”
    Oh, shit. Shit shit shit . She’d tipped her hand. She still could have lied her way out of it, said it was an old prescription or a mistake on the pharmacist’s part, but she’d offered too much information. She was caught, and there was no way out of it.
    “Wait,” she said, too late. “What pills?”
    “Birth control pills. You’ve been getting them for months, so don’t even try lying about it.”
    It was a quandary. Should she take the chance on denying it, or just come right out with the truth? “It was for medical reasons,” she said, the lie coming almost as naturally as the truth. “I needed to even out my hormone levels in order to get pregnant.”
    The laugh of his response was ugly. “If that was the truth, you would have told me before.”
    “Because you’re so warm and friendly and easy to talk to?” she asked, her voice hard.
    “You’re a liar.”
    “So you said. And so now you’re punishing me.”
    “You bet I am.”
    She shuddered at his coldness. How the hell had she ended up married to a man like this?
    “For how long?” she asked.
    “How long do you think it will take you to get pregnant?”
    “Are you kidding me? You’re going to cut me off financially until I’m pregnant ?” She wasn’t going to do it. She’d get a job. She wasn’t going to ransom a child’s future for her own shopping pleasure.
    “I’ll give you an allowance,” Jim said. “For the necessities. Say, a hundred bucks a week.”
    “A hundred.”
    “I know, it’s generous.”
    It was about sixty cents an hour for being married to him.
    “You’re despicable,” she said, and flipped her phone shut.
    She looked around the store,