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Tonya
Tonya had been submitting to this man’s every want and wish for so long that she struggled to do otherwise, even now. “I need to go after her. You just heard her say that she wants to kill herself.”
“In a minute,” he snapped. “She’s not really going to hurt herself. She was just trying to make me angry.”
She wasn’t so sure. She’d never seen her daughter so upset, and that was before her father had slapped her.
“Tonya, I need to know that you’re with me on this, and then we’ll go get her.”
“With you on what?” she cried.
“We need to fix this.”
Tonya’s thoughts were so jumbled, she couldn’t even begin to think about fixing anything. She needed time to calm down, to process.
“It’s time for damage control. I will admit everything. I will apologize to the congregation. And hopefully they won’t fire me.”
“Of course they’ll fire you!”
He looked stunned, but he finally let go of her arm. “Not if you help me. Ask them not to. Ask them for mercy. It’ll be good. It will show them that I’m human, that I struggle right along with them.”
She almost snickered. How many years had he spent pretending that he wasn’t human, that he didn’t struggle right along with them?
“Think about the congregation. Think about the families. Where will they go?”
She didn’t think they’d go anywhere. She thought they’d stay right where they were and find a new pastor. She realized he was trying to use her love for those families to control her. Well, the joke was on him, because she didn’t even love most of them. Most of the time, she was faking it. Faking it for Jesus. Faking it for Roy. How could he not have noticed that? Did he even know her?
He saw that this tack wasn’t working and shifted his sail. “Where will we go?” He held out his arms. “We are homeless without this parsonage! And no other church is going to hire me. No other church is going to give us another home!”
He squinted. He was studying her, trying to figure out how best to manipulate her.
She couldn’t let him manipulate her. Not this time. But even as she had this thought, she wasn’t sure she could stop it from happening. “I need to go get Emma.”
He completely ignored her statement. “And it’s not like you’re going to support us. You don’t have any employable skills.”
And there it was. The low self-esteem card. And why wouldn’t he play that card? It was the card that always worked. It was the card that had gotten her to marry him. Yes, she’d loved him way back then, but hadn’t he also convinced her that he was the best she could do?
“Please, Tonya. Think this through. We only have two choices.” He sounded annoyingly calm, as if he was being completely rational. Had he already thought all of this through? “We can either fight to fix this, or we can let it fall apart. Think about what that will look like. We’ll lose my job. We’ll lose our home. We’ll get divorced, and we’ll split custody. That means that for half the time, you won’t have Emma. At all.”
Her breath caught. Not have Emma? There was no way she could live like that. She tried to think. Was that really what would happen? And then who knew who he would find for his next wife? Did she want another woman anywhere near her daughter? Her chest was so tight she couldn’t breathe. Her brain spun with fears, and she didn’t know which were legitimate and which were lies. Or maybe none of them were lies. She wished she could rewind life twenty-four hours. If only she hadn’t sent Emma to the Puddys. She could have gone on not knowing.
“And you’ll be a single mom working a menial minimum wage job, so even when you have Emma, you’ll never see her. You’ll be miserable. Emma will be miserable. We can’t let this happen to our daughter.”
“Can I please go look for her?” Her voice broke.
“Tell me you’ll help me fix this.”
“Fine.” She didn’t know what else to say. She could never live with only fifty percent of Emma.
“Fine. Let’s go find her.”
She didn’t want his help, but he followed her to the door anyway.
