More lies Sean told. “I graduated MIT with honors. On my own. Growing up the way I did, I learned an important lesson. You can’t depend on anyone else to do things for you.” It made her angry to think anyone would think of her as some helpless female. She worked hard to get through the challenging school, where so many failed or burned out.

“Instead of going with one of the many lucrative job offers we received at graduation, Sean wanted to build our own company. Sean had big dreams. He sold me on the idea and the life we’d have together once the company hit big. At first, we shared the workload. But about a year into it, Sean burned out on the time-consuming and technical coding and shifted his focus from the projects to bringing in clients.”

“Sounds like a good balance. But let me guess, it wasn’t for you.”

“Don’t get me wrong, convincing people to take a chance on a brand-new startup took time and effort. Sean excelled at wining and dining potential clients. And we started winning a lot of bids.”

“But doing the actual work was a lot more time-consuming and demanding than what he did.”

“Eight-to-ten-hour days turned into fourteen-to-eighteen-hour days. While Sean was schmoozing people, taking meetings, and attending conferences, I delivered the product and slowly became more and less important to Sean.”

Luke held her gaze. “Work became more important than your personal relationship.”

“When I voiced my concerns, tried to pull back on work so we’d have more time together, he was all about the company. I became just an employee.”

“I’m sorry, Sarah. That had to hurt.”

“I got lost in Sean’s dream. I tried so hard to make him happy.”

Luke put his hand on her knee. “But you weren’t happy.”

“I wanted a home and family. But having the boys didn’t give me the home I wanted for us. And then Sean was gone and everything fell to me.”

“And you’re still doing the bulk of the projects,” he pointed out.

“Not exactly. We have nearly two hundred people at the company. Most of the programmers handle the meat and potatoes. Web design, data processing programs, system security, networking, that kind of thing. We’re a comprehensive software company.”

“So if that’s the basis of the business, what’s your focus?”

“I work on the big-ticket, complex projects that take a high-level, expert programmer. It’s kind of my thing.”

“How did you even get into programming?”

“When I went to live with my dad, he hired a full-time tutor because I was so far behind in school. He got me a laptop to do my schoolwork. I’d never used a computer. So I started asking questions about how it worked. I got basic answers from him, a bit more from my tutor, but I wanted more, so the tutor found me a couple online computer classes to do on my own.”

“And you were hooked.”

“It just made sense to me. Since I spent so much time alone as a kid, spending hours on a computer seemed like a great job to me. Getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do . . . I loved it.”