'I'll never give you one. I told you that when you left.'

'Yes, you said you'd take the children if I went for a divorce. That scared me at the time. You even used it to make me give up my job-'

'You didn't need to work. I offered you a large allowance-'

'But I wanted to be independent.'

He didn't understand that. He never had. He'd thought it madness when she'd struggled to get a diploma in bookkeeping through a correspondence course. She'd been thrilled to get work with Kendall Haines, a local environmentalist, but Garth's bitter anger had made her leave the job.

Refusing to be defeated, she'd approached the problem in a different way. She had a real flair for bookkeeping and began taking in freelance work from several small, local businesses. She'd used a computer that had been very basic even when she'd bought it second-hand, and which now looked as if it had come out of the Ark. The budget wouldn't run to the modern machine she longed for, yet still she was content. She'd won her independence in the face of Garth's hostility.

But his high-handed action still rankled. 'I was happy in that job until you forced me to leave it to stop you claiming Cindy and Adrian,' she told him now. 'I couldn't see it then, but that threat was nonsense. No court would have given you the children, and if it had you wouldn't have known what to do with them. It's just that you can't bear to let go of what was once yours. But we're not property, and it's time to let go.'

'What makes you think I've changed my mind?'

'It doesn't matter. Time has passed. Sooner or later we'll divorce, and I'd like it to be sooner. Our tenth wedding anniversary is coming up, and I don't want to be legally your wife on that day. Can't you see that it would be a mockery?'

'You were still my wife on our ninth anniversary. What difference does it make now?'

'The tenth is special,' she argued. 'It's the first of the big ones: ten, twenty, twenty-five, fifty. Ten is like a milestone. It says that your marriage has lasted. But ours hasn't.'