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That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?
    “Cooper, we can talk about this—”
    “That’s what we’re doing—”
    “No,” she said quietly. “You’re not talking, you’re shouting—”
    “Damn right I’m shouting,” he shouted. “Where I come from, people shout when they’re angry, and I’m
angry
!”
    Angry and hurt.
Goddamn,
but his heart was breaking. Obviously she loved her work more than she loved him. He felt like crying.
    “How can you call me
selfish—
”
    “You
are
being selfish,” she said, her voice starting to get louder despite her intentions to keep herself in control. “I’m talking about making two million dollars. That’s like winning the lottery, Cooper. Better—”
    “And then what?” he stormed. “What happens when the Bank of the Northeast calls and wants a new system for their twenty-five billion branches? Are you going to turn them down?”
    She couldn’t answer.
    “Right,” he said. “That just about sums it all up, doesn’t it?”
    Suddenly, Cooper remembered that a minute ago he had thought Josie wanted to talk about starting a family. How ironic! He’s daydreaming about whether they can deal with babies in their lives, and she’s about to go AWOL for over a year. It didn’t matter that he had been leaning towards not having kids. It just seemed that compared to her business, nothing about him was important. Didn’t
he
have a say in things?
    “What about babies?” he asked angrily.
    Josie stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What about
what
?”
    All of Cooper’s frustration, all of the carefully bottled-up feelings he’d been ignoring for the past five years came crashing to the surface. Marriage was supposed to be a fifty-fifty deal, wasn’t it? But it seemed like all he did was give. And now he wasn’t even going to be able to voice his opinion on procreating.
    He erupted in an explosion of words, shooting them out at Josie like bullets from a machine gun.
    Her arms crossed in front of her chest, and her eyes glinted dangerously.
    “If you’re going to insult me, or curse me out,” she interrupted him loudly, “at least have the decency to do it in English. You know I can’t understand you when you speak Spanish.”
    “Well, that’s just perfect,” Cooper spat, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair and heading for the door, “because right now I can’t understand
you
either.”
    The sound of the slamming door echoed through the empty office.
     
    Josie sat numbly in the back seat of the taxi, next to her briefcase and the box of lingerie from Victoria’s Secret.
    She and Cooper had had arguments before, but they were nothing compared to this. This had been a fight, a battle. Hell,
war
had been declared.
    She felt sick to her stomach, thinking about giving up the Fenderson contract. Could Taylor-Made Software really afford to turn work away? What if word got out? And it would, she knew it would. What if people assumed they’d turned the work down because they couldn’t handle it? What if . . . ?
    It didn’t take much to put a company out of business these days. It was true that despite the recession, Taylor-Made Software had been steadily increasing its staff, but there was no way to tell how long that would last.
    Cooper didn’t understand. He didn’t know what it was like to be really poor. He didn’t grow up watching his mother work herself to the bone, only to die far too young. He didn’t know what it was like to live in a town where welfare was the only hope of feeding the children, yet most of the men drank that money away every week, trying to numb the pain of failure.
    She’d tried to explain, but Cooper didn’t realize that as much as she enjoyed her job, it was fear that made her push so hard. It was fear that kept her so late in the office, making sure the programs her staff wrote were perfect, each job well done.
    She had thought it would ease off as the company grew, but it had only gotten worse. As she