Free Redemption by Karen Kingsbury Page A

her dreams, the death of her marriage.
    Kari didn’t know what to say. Her soul ached the way her fingers used to when she was a little girl and played in the snow without gloves.
    “I’m so sorry, honey. I’m shocked.” Her mother placed a hand on Kari’s knee. “Has he filed for divorce?”
    “I told him I won’t give it to him.”
    “So . . . you want to work it out?” Her father sat a bit straighter and raised his chin. Kari felt suddenly scrutinized, like one of his patients.
    “Don’t look at me like that, Daddy. . . .”
    “Sweetheart, I’m just trying to understand. It’s a lot to take in at once.”
    Kari felt like a high school girl being questioned about a bad date. Her eyes grew wet again as she tried to explain. “I know it’s a lot, Dad.” She tossed her hands in the air. “I’m still trying to take it in myself.”
    Her mother searched Kari’s eyes, and Kari could sense her astonishment as well. “You . . . you don’t want a divorce?”
    “Mother!” Was that the way it was, then? After all these years of teaching their children the strength of commitment, now her parents would so quickly advocate divorce? She folded her arms against her stomach, refusing the sick feeling. “I thought you two of all people would understand why I can’t . . . why divorce isn’t an option for me.”
    Her father cleared his throat, stood, and began pacing the small room. He stopped a few feet from Kari, and she could see conflict raging in his eyes. “Honey, you’re absolutely right. And we’ll do everything we can to support you in this.” He slid his hands into his pants pockets, and Kari saw the muscles in his jaw tense. “It’s just that I . . . I’d like to . . .”
    His voice broke.
    “I know.” Kari rose and hugged him, and her mother joined them, placing her arms around them both. Kari whispered as loudly as she could, given the weariness of her soul. “Your little girl’s been hurt, and you want to make it better, right?”
    When her father didn’t answer, Kari stepped back to see his face. What she saw tore at her almost as much as knowing what her husband had done. Her father, the man who had held the family together when her sister Ashley walked out five years ago, the man who had stayed upbeat and stood by her mother when her hair was falling out from chemotherapy—that same man was standing with tears running down his face.
    Kari held on to her parents and prayed they would all somehow survive the coming weeks. She had no idea how her siblings or her friends at Clear Creek Community Church would react. Everyone had always known her as the good girl, the one destined to do right and stay married forever.
    She hated the idea that now those same people were bound to feel sorry for her. The thought made her want to hide under her parents’ bed like she used to do when she was little and a springtime thunderstorm would rock the house.
    And there was something else, something she was afraid to admit even to herself. The truth was, the nausea and headaches and tired feeling she’d been fighting for the past few weeks might be more than a reaction to stress. It wasn’t a thought she even wanted to entertain in light of Tim’s admission. But that didn’t make it less possible. If something didn’t happen soon, she would have to take steps to find out.
    Kari swallowed, and from the safety of the inner circle her parents’ arms created, she calculated the dates once more in her mind. There was simply no denying the facts. She’d missed two periods in a row, something that had happened only one other time in her life.
    That had been in February three years ago.
    The first time she was pregnant.

Chapter Six
    Dirk Bennett slipped into the storeroom of the largest cafeteria on campus, the place where he’d worked since the beginning of last year. He tipped three pills from a bottle marked “Natural Power” and downed them with a swig of water. Then he peered through a