What I Love About You Read Online Free

of the guest bedroom closest to the master, envisioning all the different ideas she had for a nursery, lambs and bunnies, or perhaps Winnie-the-Pooh. She called her mother and grandmother and Michael’s parents. They’d all waited so long for the happy news and were as excited as Natalie. While she busied herself with laundry, she called her best friend since first grade, Delilah. Lilah didn’t have children, claimed she never wanted any, but had been waiting for Natalie to make her a godmother.
    “If it’s a girl, I want to name her Charlotte after my great-grandmother.”
    “You always said you wanted to name your little girl Jerrica.”
    Natalie had laughed, not at all surprised that her friend remembered the old cartoon. “From Jem and the Holograms? We were ten.” The doorbell rang as she set the laundry basket on the couch. She got off the phone and opened the door to stare into the dark glasses and badges of the Boise Police Department. They were looking for Michael, and her first thought was that something horrible had happened to her husband. That he’d been in an accident. But they had a warrant and searched her house. They asked her questions about money and Michael and accused her husband, the man she’d known for most of her life, the boy who’d sat in front of her in sixth grade, of embezzlement. Of underreporting profits and skimming money. They wanted to know about a trip she’d taken with Michael to the Cayman Islands. She told them about white sand and pale blue water. Turtles and iguanas and scuba diving. But they wanted to know about accounts in Cayman National Securities.
    She tried to call Michael, so he could clear up the misunderstanding, but his phone was shut off. She couldn’t get ahold of him that day or the next. She was interviewed and reinterviewed. She was interrogated and passed a lie detector test. Michael’s disappearance made local then national news, with his picture and hers splashed across the television. A cameraman caught her walking into her doctor’s appointment, her face pale while dark circles shadowed her eyes. She looked ready to jump out of her skin, exhausted and on edge and so terrified her husband was dead somewhere, and all anyone could talk about was money he’d supposedly embezzled.
    Michael wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t steal people’s money. Two of those people happened to be his own parents, and he would never leave Natalie to face it all alone. That wasn’t Michael, but the only other souls on the planet who seemed to agree with her were his parents.
    Ron and Carla Cooper came to stay with her that first week and the second. In the past, Natalie and Carla had butted heads sometimes. Carla Cooper was a woman who wanted things a certain way, and the older Natalie got, the more she resisted Carla’s “suggestions.” But in believing in Michael’s innocence, they were united.
    Natalie’s mother and grandmother came down to Boise the third week, but Natalie did little but stand in her and Michael’s closet, touching his clothes and smelling his old BSU hoodie. At night, she wore one of his T-shirts and slept on his pillow.
    The government seized all banking and investment accounts. It wasn’t until she learned from them that the accounts had been emptied the day before Michael’s disappearance that she got the first pang of apprehension. As soon as she felt the twinge in the pit of her stomach, she dismissed it. She was exhausted and confused and scared. Michael had been missing for over two weeks now and her life had become one hellacious moment after another. She feared for him, and she feared that the stress would harm the tiny baby she’d fought to conceive.
    For a solid month, she and Michael’s parents heard nothing. Tortured by the silence and what-ifs, until the morning she sat at the kitchen table, trying to keep down a slice of toast. The lawyer the Coopers had hired called to inform her that Michael had been found in an El Paso