Christmas is a special time of year when wishes materialize and people finally come together. At least it"s supposed to work this way in Amber"s world. Although Amber would have preferred to awaken Christmas morning with Trista"s father beside her, Christmas dinner that year was to be held on the evening of Tuesday, December 22. Hoping for miracles is a nice, but surely Jim would have to spend the holiday with that other woman he currently lived with.
As always, it was easy for Jim to leave the house. Simply announce some bogus cable outage, and he was a free man for the evening. Jim knocked on Amber"s door, dressed in his Ivan Trovsksov attire—baggy, wool pants; double-breasted, black, wool coat; black, shiny boots and now a furry, Russian hat. This strange wardrobe of Jim"s had much mor
