by Kim Gatlin
Dedication
To my children, Austin and Lauren, for reminding me that I taught them to take their worst day and make it their best when I needed to be reminded. I love you so much and thank you for the many sacrifices you’ve made.
To Mom, for always giving your wisdom, love, and support—even when it was dangerously unpopular in your circle of friends.
To my family, who gives new meaning to “It takes a village.” Thank you for all you’ve done and done and done.
To anyone who has ever had their faith in God challenged by the maneuverings of hypocrites. May they ultimately draw you closer to Him.
To Christians everywhere who take the responsibility of declaring themselves ambassadors for Christ seriously enough to be mindful of the things they say and do, but more importantly the way they treat people. Knowing others take their declarations to heart and hold them to a higher standard, they realize that when they fall short it’s not man who gets the blame, it’s God.
Contents
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter 1
Amanda Vaughn, back in Dallas just one day, was going to church. It was a sultry Tuesday afternoon in late September, and the heat and humidity rolled off the Gothic architecture of the cathedral-like edifice in sheets. Amanda descended from her rental SUV, stood before the church that had hosted her elaborate society wedding twelve years before, and wondered if more than a decade of marriage had been some kind of heat-induced mirage.
She wiped her brow, where a bead of sweat was forming. These were the days her beloved grandmother used to refer to as “hotter than young love.” Of course, Mimi hadn’t been accounting for extramarital heat, Amanda mused, shaking off the painful memories of her ex-husband’s infidelities. She stepped toward the main entrance of the sanctuary, tested the door handle, and found it unlocked. Her heart fluttered as she stepped inside. Six blocks from her parents’ home, Hillside Park Presbyterian Church was where she had attended services and gone to Bible study ever since she was a little girl, until the day she married William Armstrong Vaughn and they began their new life in Newport Beach—a life that had ended six weeks ago when she filed for divorce.
Barely breathing, Amanda stepped inside the immaculate, vast sanctuary and felt flooded with relief when she saw that nothing had changed—not the décor; not the solemn, quiet feeling she had, an awareness of God’s presence; not even the penknife marks in her family’s pew that her brother had inflicted decades earlier, and for which he had been thoroughly punished. God reigned in His high heavens and He reigned in the epicenter of His temporal kingdom in Dallas, Hillside Park Presbyterian.
Amanda felt herself drawn to this place. She had left her two children with her mother and come to wander through the church and take a stroll down memory lane. Now that she was here, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself, which was unusual. She had an hour before she was to meet Ann Anderson, her Realtor, and pick up the keys to her new home. This was the first unstructured hour she had experienced in months. She had picked out a rental house on a previous trip to Dallas a few weeks earlier, but the movers wouldn’t arrive with her family’s belongings for another day or two, and the children wouldn’t be able to start school until the following Monday. She was actually grateful to have a little time to herself after all the tumult of the last days of the marriage—the packing, the good-byes, then the actual move home. This visit to Hillside Park Presbyterian was the first time in months that she had been without an agenda item to cross off her list, without phone calls to return, without something that needed to be done, right then and by her. So she wandered through the church campus in the insufferable Dallas heat, fanning herself with someone’s discarded Sunday bulletin. For just a millisecond she found herself missing the cool ocean breezes of Southern California. It might not have ever felt like home, but at least it didn’t have humidity that ruined perfect clothes and flawless makeup just a moment after you stepped outside. Amanda opened up a door that led back inside, in part to get out of the heat and in part because she wanted to see the rooms where she had attended Sunday school as a child and then Bible study as a young adult. Once again, she found herself comforted by the lack of change. The carpets looked new, but they were the same dark red that, as a little girl, had always reminded her of the blood of Christ. The same furniture, the same elegant allegorical paintings on the walls, the same frescoes. In more ways than one, she realized, she was home, and the comfort she derived from the familiarity of a church environment went a long way in assuaging the feelings of guilt and shame that accompanied her divorce and move back to Dallas.
Amanda smiled. She had been fearful that Hillside Park Presbyterian Church had been remade into one of the seekers-type megachurches that had sprung up across the country, the kind of place that lacked the austere formality of the century-old Hillside Park Presbyterian—the new kind of place where your children could run around during the service and you could sip Starbucks while the minister intoned a socially relevant sermon televised live on the two super-large, stadium-size wide screens to the left and right of the main stage. That was the kind of church Bill had preferred. A real estate developer, he had grown up Baptist, the kind of church where you went to services three times a week—Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings, and Sunday nights—where the message was that you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t, so it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what you did as long as you were saved. He couldn’t have run fast enough and far enough from God, and more importantly, from organized religion. The Starbucks-happy megachurch in Newport Beach where Bill and Amanda had raised their children was an unhappy medium between the more formal approach to religion with which Amanda felt comfortable and the intense desire Bill had to inflict no religion whatsoever on the children. Every Sunday, the pastor passed out promises of redemption while the barista served up lattes. But Hillside Park Presbyterian hadn’t buckled to the “can I get my redemption with a latte?” trend.
Suddenly, Amanda felt an enormous pang of regret—if she and Bill had lived in Hillside Park and had been part of this church family, they might still be happily married today. But there had been so many reasons to leave. Bill was a fourth-generation Hillside Parker from a very wealthy, very high-profile family, and his father and mother both had certain expectations as well as plans of their own for him. But Bill was determined to be his own man and prove to everyone, especially himself, that he could be successful on his own and without a leg up, banking on the family name every time someone took his phone call.
His father was very conservative and very old-school in his approach to business. Bill, however, was caught up in the real estate frenzy and was much more of a risk taker than his father. It was too small a town, too small a neighborhood, and certainly too small a business community to try and do anything his fami
ly would’ve considered risky without someone letting them know all about it. He wanted his independence, his own identity, and his own freedom from religion. One of his best friends from college was from Newport, and Bill had been out to visit several times over the years. He had always thought it would be the perfect place for him to make a fresh start.
Amanda was more than willing to join him in this adventure. They were madly in love back then, and even though Bill was considered quite the catch, Elizabeth, her mother, had her ways of letting Amanda know she didn’t really approve. There was always the hint of “you could’ve done so much better” as far as Bill was concerned, but Amanda knew that the sad truth was that Bill could’ve been anyone, and Elizabeth would’ve put her through the same motions.
She’d always felt the California move was the right one for both of them; they were happy there, she’d thought. Maybe if they’d found a church like Hillside Park Presbyterian when they got to Newport? But religion wasn’t magic, she told herself. Bill would have spent just as much time running around with single—and married—women in Hillside Park as he had in Newport Beach. He would never have stayed in Dallas—he used to joke that the only reason he stopped when he got to Newport Beach was that the country had run out of land. It amazed Amanda that he had never moved to Hawaii—anything to get as far away as possible from home, his parents, and Jesus Christ. But that was all behind her now, Amanda told herself. She took a deep breath and said a small prayer of thanks that she was back in comfortable, familiar territory, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, had changed. That’s when she heard a familiar woman’s voice coming from one of the lecture rooms used for Bible studies down the hall. Unless she was mistaken, it was none other than Sharon Peavy, her best friend growing up, a girl who had gone from homecoming queen at her high school to a career in the hospitality industry, working in various five-diamond properties in and around Dallas in marketing and sales. Rumor had it, Amanda knew—and wished she didn’t know—that Sharon’s career had benefited from extending an all-too-personal brand of hospitality to some of the higher-ups in her company. Sharon was known for having the “best chest” of any woman in Hillside Park, and its origin—natural or store-bought?—had been the subject of heated discussion among men and women for years. Sharon told anyone who asked, and many who didn’t, that they were God-given; anyone with contrary evidence had yet to step forward. Amanda checked her watch and saw that it was ten minutes to three. Unless the church had changed its schedule, that meant that a Bible-study class, which Sharon was apparently leading, had about ten minutes left. Silently, Amanda slipped in unnoticed and took a seat in the back of the utilitarian, somewhat ordinary room that had been home to Bible studies for generations of Hillside Park women.
Sharon was talking about the evils of gossip, a topic that both attracted and repelled the ladies of Hillside Park. They knew that it was tough to square their desire to air each other’s dirty laundry with their desire to remain true to their Christian witness, but sometimes a story was just too good not to pass along. And since you had the safety net of being saved, a few earthly infractions of spiritual law wouldn’t get a girl kicked out of heaven, would they?
“Now before we close,” Sharon was saying as she adjusted her Marc Jacobs fuchsia blouse, “do y’all have any prayer requests this afternoon? Mmm?” Amanda smiled at Sharon’s familiar twang as a memory from her teenage years resurfaced. At sixteen or seventeen, Amanda had been sitting with her family in church one Sunday morning when the minister’s son, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, ascended the pulpit. A former football hero at Auburn, he had come back to Dallas to assist his father in running the church.
He was surprisingly well-spoken for a football player, dangerously handsome, with an incredible heart for Christ. He delivered a powerful and moving message about God’s grace that had brought Amanda to tears. And then suddenly her sister, sitting two seats over, had leaned toward her and whispered in her ear, “I can’t stand Sharon Peavy. Whose idea was it to include her for lunch after church, anyway? We’ve got to get rid of her!”
The sharp contrast between her own rapt attention to the captivating sermon and the fact that her sister hadn’t been listening at all had tickled Amanda—she remembered having to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from laughing out loud. And, of course, fearing the roof would cave in.
As it turned out, Amanda’s sister wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Sharon Peavy. It was well known that although she presented herself well, she was really a total mess. The girl simply wasn’t marriage material—she had come close a few times, even been formally engaged at one point, but she had never “closed a deal,” to use the expression favored in this town full of real estate moguls.
Sharon just couldn’t close. That’s what Amanda had heard from her mother; she had hardly spoken with Sharon since her own wedding, which was rather odd considering that Sharon had been her maid of honor. You know, a Christmas card once a year and the usual “tell her hellos” through mutual friends over the years. Bill and Amanda had made a point of not coming home very often—or maybe really not at all. They both were so caught up in their new lives in California and then came the children, it was just easier to have the grandparents come to them. On the very rare occasion they came to Dallas, it was usually on their way home from an international flight, and they’d plan it to where they’d literally have one night at Elizabeth’s. There was no time to see anyone and it was an easy way to keep her mother appeased, but certainly left no time to see and visit with old friends.
Amanda was always walking a tightrope between Bill and her mother. The wealthier Bill got, the more she approved and the more willing she was to put their past behind them, but Bill had a long memory, and the more successful he became, the less desire he had for Elizabeth’s approval or any relationship with her at all. It was just easier on everyone when they kept to themselves in California to enjoy this wonderful new life they’d carefully designed for themselves. Amanda had a couple of friends from high school come visit her in Newport, but for the most part, she’d hardly seen anyone since she’d left home. But that’s how things went sometimes. You grow apart. You lose touch. You move on.
In response to Sharon’s call for prayer requests, a hand in the back of the room went up. Amanda craned to see who was asking to speak.
It was a woman she didn’t recognize, dressed head to toe in the latest couture. She was blond, gorgeous, and in perfect physical condition—a standard-issue Hillside Park housewife. Beside her, Amanda noticed, sat a grossly overweight woman in sweats—not even Juicy or Nike, but cheap, tacky sweats, although she looked as though she was the kind of girl who, when the urge for exercise arose, lay down until it passed. It didn’t look as though she had sweated a day in her life, Amanda decided, except maybe over how she’d pay her rent or when trying to remember how to apply makeup on the rare occasions when she was forced to wear it. Amanda immediately felt guilty for judging the woman. The nice thing about Hillside Park Presbyterian was that it attracted a broad socioeconomic range of constituents, and a woman whose net worth was probably a negative number could sit comfortably, or at least relatively comfortably, beside a woman who was clearly and unabashedly Texas rich, and they could study the same Bible together.
“You go ahead, darlin’,” Sharon Peavy said, her fingers tapping a quick rhythm on her leather-bound New International Version New Testament.
The blond-haired woman cleared her throat. “I’d like to ask for prayer for my neighbor,” she began, “and of course I would never mention her name, out of respect for her privacy.”
Anxiously, the women of the room turned, barely perceptibly, toward the speaker. She spoke softly, and it was evidently going to be a juicy story.
“She’s been separated from her husband for quite some time, and I’m afraid that her husband’s business isn’t doing all that well, what with everything going on in real estate right now, and you know financial issues only add
more pressure to their problems. She’s such a sweet girl, and her children have lived in that house all their lives. It’s the only home they’ve ever known. If something were to happen to her husband’s business and they had to sell their house, I just don’t know what that family would do. And little Johnny’s been best friends with our little Tommy all these years—it would just be tragic if they couldn’t make the payments on that nice house anymore, or divorced and had to move.” Amanda had forgotten the order of concern when first hearing the news of a failing neighborhood marriage: Do you get to keep your house, was there a third party involved, then “how are your children?”
“Anyway, the reason I want to ask for prayer for her is that this past weekend, the kids were all at her husband’s place. I don’t know how he manages to keep his head up, living in that dreary little apartment complex right on the edge of Hillside Park, but somehow he gets by.” Amanda thought she saw the frumpy woman in the sweat suit stiffen. Maybe she lived there, too.