A few weeks before our wedding I discovered that I was pregnant. Peter and I had been very careful, but clearly God had another plan. When we told my parents that I was pregnant, they were thrilled. When we told Nancy she glared at me and said, "I knew you would get pregnant."

Our European honeymoon consisted of a lot of eating and sleeping. I started feeling very badly on our honeymoon and we flew back early to see my doctor. The doctor told us that many pregnancies end spontaneously for no apparent reason in the first trimester and really nothing can be done. He told me that some doctors recommend getting plenty of rest, but he didn’t think it really made a difference. Only time would tell. I was devastated. We had not planned on getting pregnant at that time, but now that I was, I definitely did not want to lose the baby.

While we were in Europe, Nancy allowed the salesgirls to run the store. She did not even go in to check on things. A few suppliers called saying we owed them money and the salesgirls wrote out checks to them, stamped them with Nancy’s signature stamp and mailed them off. The pay period ended while we were out of town and the salesgirls cut their own paychecks, which bounced because all of the money had been given to the suppliers.

When we returned to the store, the checking account was negative, checks were bouncing, the employees were ready to mutiny and Nancy actually demanded to know what was going on from us. I felt like saying, "What do you mean? You were the one who was supposed to be in charge here!" We had come back early because of the baby scare which was a good thing because another week with the salesgirls in charge might have been too much from which to recover.

Nancy was openly hostile to me during my pregnancy. She even told Peter that if we were to get divorced Pierson would be fine, just like Peter was when his parents divorced. She told me that I was "so big it hurt to look at me." She constantly talked about how great she looked as a pregnant mother, "just a stick with a bump." I began to avoid her as much as possible.