But they also, she had to admit, credited experience. Not that she hadn’t tried that route, but the big openings for her were in the oil industry, and that meant both swallowing a lot of her principles and old ideals and also facing the probability of going off to Third World countries where women had no rights at all and trying to do a job there.

Finally she got this job, one she really loved, thanks to an old professor of hers who had become department head. As an instructor, teaching undergrads basic courses, it hadn’t been the fun it should have been, but it allowed her to work as an assistant on the real research, even if it wasn’t her grant and wouldn’t merit more than a “thanks” in the articles that might be published out of it. Still, she’d done more work in the lab than the professors who would get the credit, trying to show them, prove to them that she was in their league and on their level.

And now she was thirty-six going on thirty-seven, not yet tenured, teaching elementary courses to humanities students who didn’t give a damn but needed these few basic science courses so they could get B.S. instead of B.A. degrees. And she was alone in this mostly stripped apartment, going nowhere as usual and doing it alone.

Not that he’d dropped her. She had been the one to break it off, the one to give the ultimatum. It was always understood that they had an “open” relationship, that they were free to see others and not be tied down. They even laughed at the start about making sure they both had safe sex and got regular tests for any nasties that might be picked up. And she’d meant it at the time. The problem was she’d never fooled around with anybody else after he’d moved in, even though she’d had the chance. She simply didn’t need anybody else. But he’d kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it until he’d done it with a regularity that finally showed that he was not about to slow down or become monogamous.