“Well, you need to find a way to get over it because those people are expecting me, Reverend Jeremy Williams, to be in Atlanta to speak tomorrow.” He snatched his computer bag and moved toward the steps. “The ministers meeting is at noon, as it always is.”

His back was to me when I said, “And like I told you, I have plans.”

But Jeremy kept walking as if his word was the last word. When I heard his footsteps trotting up the stairs, all I could do was squeeze my hands into fists.

It had been a long time since I’d been this angry and the challenge was, when I got like this, there was no telling what I would do.

Chapter 12

“You didn’t go to the meeting!”

My chest heaved, I was breathing so heavily as I paced the width of our bedroom.

“I can’t believe you didn’t go to the meeting.”

I squeezed my cell phone as if I were trying to break it with my bare hand. But better the cell phone than Jeremy’s neck, which was what I would’ve been breaking if he’d been standing in front of me. He had one more time to shout at me and I would click off this phone, right in the middle of his rant.

“Why didn’t you do what I told you to do?”

With those words, I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Had Jeremy Williams really just asked me that? Was he truly speaking to me like I was Jasmine or Jayden?

“I’m talking to you, Ginger. Do you hear me?” Jeremy shouted.

“The real question is,” I said, speaking my first words since I’d answered Jeremy’s call, “do you hear yourself? You’re talking to me like I’m one of your children and you need to calm yourself if you want me to stay on this phone.”

I heard his deep sigh and then after a few moments, he said, “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that Lizzy sent me the minutes from the meeting and I’m blown away because that meeting was so important to me, Ginger.”

“I know it was. Just like my plans were important to me. But you know what, Jeremy, even though you’d pissed me off, even though you didn’t give any consideration to what I had to do, even though you acted like the world revolved around you, I still went ahead and changed my plans.”

“How can you say that? You didn’t go to the meeting.”

“You’re a man of God, so you need to stop lying.” I paused, giving him a moment to calm down so that he would hear me. “I changed, not only my schedule, but the girl’s schedule, too. I went to the job fair early, didn’t stay as long as I would have liked and I made it to the church before the end of the meeting. If you have the minutes from Lizzy, you know that.”

“You didn’t make it in time. They’d already taken the vote to bring irrigation project to the board and you know that’s not what I wanted.”