I'm sorry I spoke

"I'm sorry I spoke."
"I'm glad you spoke, because this is just the kind of thing I don't want you to say to Ned. He's the man I love, and I want to marry him, so I'm asking you to be nice to him over Christmas."
"I'll do my best," Olga said lightly.
Miranda wanted her sister to understand how important this was. "I need him to feel that he and I can build a new family together, for ourselves and the two children. I'm asking you to help me convince him we can do that."
"All right. Okay."
"If this holiday goes well, I think he'll agree to a date for the wedding."
Olga touched Miranda's hand. "I get the message. I know how much it means to you. I'll be good."
Miranda had made her point. Satisfied, she turned her mind to another area of friction. "I hope things go all right between Daddy and Kit."
"So do I, but there's not much we can do about it."
"Kit called me a few days ago. For some reason, he's dead keen to sleep in the guest cottage at Steepfall."
Olga bridled. "Why should he have the cottage all to himself? That means you and Ned and Hugo and I will all have to squeeze into two poky bedrooms in the old house!"
Miranda had expected Olga to resist this. "I know it's unreasonable, but I said it was okay by me. It was difficult enough to persuade him to come—I didn't want to put an obstacle in the way."
"He's a selfish little bastard. What reason did he give you?"
"I didn't question him."
"Well, I will." Olga took her mobile phone from her briefcase and pressed a number.
"Don't make an issue of this," Miranda pleaded.
"I just want to ask him the question." Speaking into the phone, she said: "Kit—what's this about you sleeping in the cottage? Don't you think it's a bit—" She paused. "Oh. Why not? ... I see ... but why don't you—" She stopped abruptly, as if he had hung up on her.
Miranda thought, sadly, that she knew what Kit had said. "What is it?"
Olga put the phone back into her bag. "We don't need to argue about the cottage. He's changed his mind. He's not coming to Steepfall after all."
Chapter 7
9 AM
OXENFORD MEDICAL was under siege. Reporters,cheap designer handbags, photographers, and television crews massed outside the entrance gates, harassing employees as they arrived for work, crowding around their cars and bicycles, shoving cameras and microphones in their faces,homepage, shouting questions. The security guards were trying desperately to separate the media people from the normal traffic, to prevent accidents,nike shox torch ii, but were getting no cooperation from the journalists. To make matters worse, a group of animal-rights protesters had seized the opportunity for some publicity, and were holding a demonstration at the gates, waving banners and singing protest songs. The cameramen were filming the demonstration, having little else to shoot,fake uggs. Toni Gallo watched, feeling angry and helpless.
She was in Stanley Oxenford's office, a large corner room that had been the master bedroom of the house. Stanley worked with the old and the new mingled around him: his computer workstation stood on a scratched wooden table he had had for thirty years, and on a side table was an optical microscope from the sixties that he still liked to use from time to time. The microscope was now surrounded by Christmas cards, one of them from Toni. On the wall, a Victorian engraving of the periodic table of the elements hung beside a photograph of a striking black-haired girl in a wedding dress—his late wife, Marta.