What I Love About You Read Online Free Page A

hotel. Very much alive. For two beats her heart swelled in her chest. Michael was alive.
    In the next two heartbeats her chest caved. Her whole life fell apart as the breaking news continued. He’d been found with several fake passports and driver’s licenses. All under assumed names. How did a person even get one fake passport, let alone three? Worse, at least for her, he also had a twenty-year-old girlfriend, Tiffany.
    Natalie would not have believed it if she hadn’t seen him on the national news, cuffed and doing the perp walk into the El Paso County Jail, his dark hair longer than usual and a dark beard and mustache covering the lower half of his face. Over and over she watched her handsome husband, head down, as he hurried past the cameras.
    She found out over the next few days and weeks that he and Tiffany were waiting to slip into Mexico and then head for Switzerland. He’d planned it all out. The theft. The bank accounts. The new identities. The new twenty-year-old version of Natalie. He’d planned all that and she’d never known.
    Years later, she could still recall that day he’d been apprehended. She recalled the half-eaten toast in her hand. The images on the television screen and the floor rushing up toward her. Sitting for hours and watching the news footage, chewing up her heart and spitting it out and unable to look away.
    The summer after she and Michael got married, they’d left Truly. The football star and the cheerleader—off to live a golden life. The town had practically thrown a parade at their parting.
    Ten years later, Natalie returned home alone and pregnant, her soon-to-be-former husband facing seven years in a federal prison. The government took everything. Her house. Her car. Her jewelry. Her life. She returned heartbroken, humiliated, and penniless. She had nothing but a suitcase in one hand and a camera in the other. In her head she had a whole notebook of questions.
    Questions like when had her life gone so wrong? Had she been so wrapped up in creating a miracle baby that she hadn’t noticed the changes in her husband? Had the changes started with little things? Like his preference for bourbon rather than beer. When had the small-town boy turned into a man who would steal from corporations and old people without discrimination or conscience? When had he become a liar and a cheater? When had he stopped loving her?
    The answers came in a phone call a year after Michael had been sentenced. It had been the first time she’d heard his voice since the trial.
    “You’re boring,” he’d said.
    At the time, those two words had crushed her. Now at the age of thirty-three she was older and wiser and wished for some boredom in her life. She was a single mother of her miracle child. The owner of Glamour Snaps and Prints, a photography studio and digital photo print shop. Her life was very busy. Her life was good, but late at night, when the house was quiet and Charlotte was in bed, she sometimes wondered if she’d ever really known Michael at all.
    “I told her she was too mature for the smoky eye.”
    Natalie placed her elbows on the front counter and her face in her hands. She frowned at the prints of eighty-year-old Mabel Vaughn. “She looks like someone punched her,” she told her best friend, Lilah Markham. The two women stood in Glamour Snaps and Prints, located on Main and Second streets, wearing identical scowls, but that was where any similarities ended. Natalie was five-feet-seven. Lilah, five-one. Natalie wore black pants and ballet flats and a white blouse with the name of her business embroidered on the breast pocket. Her blond ponytail was held at the back of her head with a simple black band. She wore mascara and coral lip gloss, and a single silver ring circled the middle finger of her right hand.
    Currently, Lilah wore a short leather dress and leather boots with five-inch heels. Perfectly applied gray and purple shadowed her brown eyes. Her red hair was buzzed on the