Charitable Thoughts, she reminded herself as she pinched the skin beneath her wrist. That was the phrase Dr. Charlton had suggested. Charitable Thoughts, and pinch beneath the angel charm on your wristwatch. Betty shut her eyes and forced another sharp inhalation through her nostrils, and then another, and one more, until her blood pressure returned to normal and her veins ceased to throb.

She reminded herself that she and Charles had four beautiful children. (Not that the Daltons’ daughter Charlotte wasn’t a lovely girl, she really had very good manners, if Betty were being completely honest, but she did have a tendency to slouch, but Charitable Thoughts!)

Betty had often thought she might want to write her memoirs when she reached her later years. She had a lot of advice to offer young girls and women everywhere. Thoughts about posture and breeding and manners, as well as her own life story. Although, if she were to write her memoirs, she wasn’t sure she would be completely honest about everything, unless her later years became her golden years, and she could finish the final chapter on her deathbed.

If things had gone differently in her youth, she might have married someone else altogether. But she had married Charles. All part of God’s plan! Perhaps, if she hadn’t gotten into trouble, she might have, might have, chosen someone else to spend her life with.

And, just every so often, she let her mind wander into an imaginary, unwritten chapter in her not-yet-written memoirs. A chapter where she’d lay her soul bare, and admit on the imaginary printed page that Charles’s family money and social standing had taken precedence over a stronger urge deep inside her, all those years ago.

She hadn’t thought about him in years (another lie). She couldn’t even bring herself to think his name, she could only think of him as that urge, because of the way the memory made her feel. (That was true.) Uncontrolled. She was uncomfortable with the involuntary response of her body when she imagined his face hovering over hers, his strong arms pinning hers down as they both laughed, and she could almost smell him as she remembered. The mixture of the pleasant with the masculine and the acrid.

Her eyes closed and the chapter continued writing itself in her mind as she took another deep breath through her nostrils, half expecting to smell that smell. That smell was the real reason she had to have Dolly take the car to the filling station. Because she couldn’t be around that smell. But when she inhaled in front of her vanity mirror, in the bedroom she shared with her well-bred, snoring husband, all she could smell was the cold cream.

That foul, grossly inebriated Santa Claus, endangering the innocence and wonder of Wooster’s children, and polluting the very idea and spirit of Christmas. Jesus Christ was not born in a straw-filled manger in Bethlehem so that some filthy, drunken hobo could wreak havoc in the toy department of Freedlander’s and desecrate the holiness of Our Lord and Savior’s special day.