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well. ‘I hope it turns out to be everything you want it to be,’ she’d said. ‘I expect an invitation to come and visit.’
    While he regretted their marriage had come to an end, he treasured the good relationship he and Bea had managed to maintain in the three years since the divorce. She had remarried eighteen months ago and was now the mother she had always wanted to be. Her new husband, Steve, was a thoroughly decent guy and Owen was happy for Bea.
    Children had been one of those things both he and Bea had been keen to have, but after extensive attempts to get pregnant – let no one call him a slouch in that department! – they had sought professional help only to discover he was at fault. ‘Not at fault ,’ the doctor had corrected Owen when he had used the word, ‘just deficient in sperm.’ Whichever way the diagnosis was served up, the net result was that Owen knew he couldn’t do the one thing that had become so important to Bea, and with her body clock ticking loud and fast, the pressure between them grew. They discussed endlessly the options available, such as adoption and donor sperm, but never quite reached the point of committing to either.
    He would never know for sure, but Owen couldn’t help but wonder whether, had they been able to have a child together, they would have heeded the warning signs and realized sooner that their marriage was suffering because they were working too hard?
    Well, they hadn’t, and it was into their jointly owned business that the two of them poured both heart and soul. From his own point of view, it felt as if it was the only thing he could get right.
    Four years after graduating from university, where he and Bea had met, they had given up their jobs – he had been a trader in the City and Bea had been a solicitor – and together they started running a mail order business for ski wear. They called it ObeSkiWear and being keen skiers themselves, they knew what worked and what didn’t. When the internet took off, they began selling online and that was when things went stratospheric and they were working crazy hours. And failing to conceive a child.
    The combination of working too hard and not being able to do what all their friends were doing so effortlessly was not a good mix. But ultimately it was the pressure they were under to sustain the success of what they’d created that was their undoing. What had once been their ‘baby’, conceived in their spare room, had grown into a monster that demanded all their time and energy. From their warehouse and office in Crawley, they were constantly travelling, attending trade shows, meeting new suppliers and designers, carrying out stringent quality control, devising new marketing strategies and most importantly ensuring their customers were always happy and would come back for more.
    When they took the step to open some stores in carefully selected towns, friends who had known them for many years began to voice their concern, namely that he and Bea looked to be on the verge of burnout and that they couldn’t continue living at the frantic pace they were. The most vociferous voice of concern had come from Owen’s oldest friend. It was an opinion that Owen had dismissed as a severe case of the pot calling the kettle black because Rich, who still worked as a trader in the city, regularly put in a fourteen-hour day and often looked like hell whenever they could spare the time to see each other.
    But being the man he was then, Owen refused to admit anything was wrong and even when he and Bea decided to call it a day on their marriage, he was convinced they could continue working together. Bea humoured him for about a year, but around the time that Owen’s mother died, when she met and fell in love with Steve, she announced that she wanted out, saying she wanted to create a new life for herself, a life that included a family.
    It was then, when Owen was trying to summon up the strength to continue without Bea, that one of