My Wife, My Man?

Chapter Forty-one

"Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own."
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.a

Monday came too soon, dragging along its anxieties.

It didn't bother Perli that just in a few hours her father-in-law was soon to come, nor that his presence would serve as a constant reminder of the differences that existed between her husband and herself — no, it didn't bother her at all. It was rather the recent change in mood and behaviour that she had observed from her husband.

An attempt to ask what the problem was was an utter failure. He simply shook his head and said it was nothing he couldn't handle.

Nothing he couldn't handle.

She sighed her worry away and again engaged herself in the act of mentally running through the checklist of all that needed to be done before Daniel's arrival. Even when she had been doing this for the past two days, she still had the fear that there was something she had missed.

Okay, maybe she was as much as worried about Daniel's arrival as she was about Jack.

Chef? Her eyes travelled about in search of the man in white among the few people who roamed the front yard. He wasn't a necessity; so, Jack had said and thought it was rather stupid hiring someone to cook when they could have easily done it themselves.

Fingers snapped in front of Perli's face, and then came a light laugh.

"Who are you searching for?" A smile played on Maggie's lips. "Searching for your husband I see."

Perli shook her head and smiled lightly while gesturing at the chef to come into the house.

"Oh, you don't have to be shy around me," Maggie teased, nudging her by the shoulder.

"You tease me too much Maggie," came a gentle laugh and the swinging of her arm over the older lady's shoulders. "I'm just making sure that everything is ready for my lord's arrival. You know my lord will try to find the littlest fault in this place and have me hung for it."

"Oh, you're so bad for teasing your father-in-law like that," Maggie couldn't help but crack a short laugh.

Perli placed her free hand over her chest as if to swear. "Tease? Never! I can never tease my Lord."

Maggie removed Perli's arm from her shoulder. "Okay, enough with the crappy English accent."

"Crappy?" Perli gasped, dramatically placing her hand on her chest. "How harsh! And here I thought I was getting good at it."

Maggie smiled and shook her head. "Isn't that your phone ringing inside?"

Perli inclined her ears to hear the faint sound of her phone. "Yeah, I will be right back." With that, she rushed into the house and up the stairs in search of her phone.

After a minute of intense searching, she found her phone hidden under a pile of thin textbooks in her room. The first thing that caught her attention was the office-like number that was on the phone's screen.

It must be Jack's office; she grew good at the assumption game as her finger pressed the answer button on her screen.

She held the phone anxiously close to her ear. "Hello, this is Perli speaking. To whom am I speaking to?"

"Good day Perli," it was a lady's voice. It had a certain urgency in it. "You're speaking to Amy Watson from the Johannesburg Hospital..."

Perli felt uncomfortable at the word hospital. Such a place had only served ugly memories in her life. Her childhood was filled with hospital visits, as due to her weak immune system, asthma, and constant allergies, she was forced to be on medication. Now that she thought about it, she spent more of her childhood in the hospital than she did at home.