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the family short term. What he should do to find another job. She caught herself up short; it would do no good to panic. “Okay, let’s wait a minute. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll be okay.”
    He only looked at her.
    She frowned. “I can’t believe they’d fire someone right before the holidays! When exactly did this happen?”
    Another gulp from his glass. “August.”
    “
August?
” Meg sat up straighter in the chair. “You’ve been out of work since August, and you didn’t tell me?”
    He ran a hand across his forehead tiredly. “I thought I could find another job before I had to tell you. I thought I could fix things.”
    Questions were piling up in her mind. “But … what have you been doing every day when you tell us you’re at the office?”
    “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Going out, walking, hanging out at Starbucks.”
    “You’ve been pretending to go to the office.” Meg was stunned, replaying in her mind’s eye the months of his dressing for work, taking his briefcase, acting as if everything were the same as always.
    “I didn’t want the kids to know. Or you. It was humiliating.”
    Slowly, anger began to crowd Meg’s fear. “You didn’t tell your wife you were fired because you were
embarrassed?
Are you crazy? I could have helped. I could have done a million things.” She was struck by another thought. “And instead of listening to your yelling about the bills, I could have put a halt to all spending. That’s what needed to be done.” She sank back in her chair. “This is unbelievable, James. In a million years, I never would have expected—”
    His expression was pained. “Yeah, well, it was stupid, but you don’t know what it feels like to get thrown out of a big job like that, do you?”
    She was stunned by the jibe, but she let it pass. Her voice softened. “No, you’re right. I don’t. I’m just a bit horrified that you would put on such a charade. And that you didn’t feel you could trust me enough to tell me.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, we have plenty of savings, and you’ll get another job eventually.”
    He gave her a nasty smile, one she had never seen on him before. “But that wasn’t the bad news.”
    She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear what else he might say.
    “In September I had a great opportunity to invest in a real estate deal. I jumped at it. It was a beautiful deal.”
    He stopped. Meg swallowed, waiting.
    “A few weeks into it, one of the other big investors dropped out. The deal couldn’t go forward, and I saw an opportunity to double my returns. I’d make enough so that I could retire, never even have to get another job. I took it. All in.”
    Meg’s stomach clenched. “And …?”
    “The guy who put together the deal turned out to be a crook. He stole everything and disappeared.”
    There was a long silence in the room.
    “How much did we lose?” Meg whispered.
    “Everything.”
    Meg barely got the words out. “What’s ‘everything’?”
    Anger at her slowness flashed in his eyes. “Everything means
everything
! All the money we had in the world. Whatever we had as collateral.”
    “You don’t mean the house?” She silently begged him to answer no.
    “Of course! The house, the savings, our investments.”
    “No, you didn’t,” Meg breathed. “You couldn’t have.”
    Rage and pain flashed across his face as he smacked his hand on the desk. “I could, and I did. I was desperate, and that affected my judgment. That’s what did it. McDowall knew I’d been let go, and he played on that, too.”
    “Is that who took our money? Are they going to find him?”
    “They did, but it’s not going to help us any. About an hour ago, I talked to another guy who was also an investor. They found McDowall last night in a hotel in Los Angeles. He shot himself. No money anywhere. Nobody knows what happened.”
    Meg’s hand rose to her throat. “Maybe …”
    He grimaced. “We’re never going to see that