Ted stared down at the wedding band which encircled her finger. ‘Is that why you agreed to marry me, because you were thinking ahead?’

Isobel covered her face with her hands and began to sob. ‘You’re making me out to be a monster, yet what woman doesn’t plan her future?’

Ted swiftly apologised, but Isobel wasn’t up for accepting his apology and had spent the rest of the honeymoon in the darkness of their bedroom claiming to be suffering with a migraine, which she insisted had been brought on by his outrageous accusations.

It was odd, Ted thought now, how she had never suffered with migraines before their marriage, but since their wedding day some five years earlier she succumbed to one at least twice a week, something which had not gone unnoticed by his father.

‘Is everything all right with Isobel?’ Craig asked at work one day.

Ted nodded. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘She seems to be suffering with headaches a lot. Do you have any idea what could be causing them?’

Ted stopped himself from replying ‘marriage’, because he didn’t want his father to worry unduly, but if Ted was honest with himself, he felt certain that this was the root of her migraines. When war was announced he had jumped at the opportunity to join up, partly because it would get him away from Isobel and her constant whining.

‘An RAF mechanic?’ Isobel had said, her tone filled with disgust. ‘You have the opportunity to own your own business, and even branch out!’ She flung his acceptance papers back at him. ‘Yet you chose to throw all that away in favour of becoming a grease monkey!’

Ted had stared at her. ‘I’ll be doing it for king and country,’ he said, his jaw flinching as he tried to keep his temper from rising. ‘I’d say that’s being a bit more than a grease monkey. I’d have thought you’d have been proud.’

‘Proud?’ echoed Isobel. ‘You’ve thrown away an opportunity of a lifetime for peanuts?’

Ted’s brow furrowed. ‘It’s not forever. I’ll come back when the war’s over.’

She threw her hands up in despair. ‘Goodness only knows how long that will be, and what happens to me if you get killed?’

Ted stifled a shocked laugh behind his fingers. Isobel had spoken the truth at last. He smiled levelly. ‘You could always get a job.’

She regarded him through narrowing eyes. ‘You don’t care about me at all, do you? I knew it from the moment we arrived at our so-called honeymoon, you’ve never valued me for the person I am. Sometimes I feel as though you don’t know me at all.’

‘That makes two of us,’ Ted muttered beneath his breath.