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gulped down now bubbled
ominously in her belly. “We stopped talking to each
other.”
    “ Care to
elaborate?”
    “ I got too caught up in my
work.” She was getting good at telling half-truths.
    “ How caught up is too
caught up? You’re a career-oriented woman. Theo knew that going
in.”
    “ Yeah. And he’s a
career-oriented man, so it shouldn’t have made a difference.” There
was a time when their long office hours served only to sweeten the
hours spent together. In an absence-making-the-heart-grow-fonder
kind of a way. “But it did.”
    “ How?”
    Good question. One Zoey had been grappling
with for weeks. “Well, initially we never saw each other, for one.
He’d be asleep when I left in the morning, and I’d…” It was on the
tip of her tongue to say she’d already fallen asleep when he came
to bed, but that wasn’t true. More often than not she pretended to
sleep to avoid him. “And I was too wiped by the time he came to bed
to make any effort.”
    Even when he was home, Theo often stayed up
late, liking to be on the net when Wall Street opened.
    “ You were wiped out by
your Well Women clinic?”
    Zoey nodded. “Yeah. It’s really taken off.
We’ve been so busy, even now I hardly have time for a coffee when
I’m at the rooms.” She’d only been able to get away now because
Katie had promised to look after the clinic and her patients while
she was gone.
    A keen and personal interest in hormonal
imbalances in women had inspired Zoey to open the clinic. As a
teenager, she’d suffered from horrendous premenstrual symptoms. Her
lack of a relationship with her mother meant she’d had no one to
turn to about it, and her symptoms, both physical and emotional,
had continued untreated for years. When she’d gone on the pill at
eighteen, her life had changed forever.
    Zoey vowed then that if she could help a
woman sort out her hormonal issues, she would. It was her primary
motivation for doing medicine. She never wanted anyone else to live
through the emotional ups and downs she’d endured.
    “ We’ve gotten so many new
patients over the last three months, we have to move to bigger
rooms.”
    “ And Theo doesn’t
approve?”
    Theo didn’t even know they were moving. Zoey
rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen the muscles. “It’s not that
he doesn’t approve.”
    “ Then what?”
    “ He just got used to me
being too busy to talk to, I guess. So he stopped trying. And once
he stopped trying, I started getting upset because he never spoke
to me anymore.”
    Fiona shot her a sardonic look.
    Oh yeah, Fi wasn’t scared to call Zoey out
on her shortcomings. Which was exactly why Zoey was with her. She
didn’t need mollycoddling. She needed a friend to pour her drinks,
get her drunk and help her focus on the disaster that was her
marriage.
    She gave Fiona a guilty smile. “I know. It
sounds stupid. It was my fault to begin with, and then I blamed
him. But it all kind of unraveled from there. Instead of telling
him I was upset, I started snapping. And you know Theo. He’s no
sap. If I yell at him, he’ll yell right back. Then we’d get even
more irritated with each other and start fighting.”
    Fiona looked unconvinced. “You and Theo have
had a million fights. You’ve always bounced back.”
    “ Yeah, we have.” They
usually bounced back naked and sweaty from great make-up sex.
Sometimes Zoey would deliberately pick a fight just so they could
have great make-up sex. “But this is different. Those were one-off,
in-your-face issues that exploded, so we had to tackle them then
and there. This crept up on us so slowly and so insidiously, I
didn’t even notice it was happening.” She’d been too absorbed in
herself and in work. “And once I did realize, it had already become
a regular pattern of behavior.” She stared beseechingly at Fiona,
pleading with her to understand something Zoey couldn’t really
understand herself. “I don’t know how to stop it now, Fi. I don’t
know how