JANA SIGHED as she plugged in the memory stick and opened the file Jerry Richardson had given her. She enjoyed her work and derived satisfaction from doing it well, but it was the third time this week that Jerry had asked her to find an error someone else had made, and it always put her even further behind with her own endless piles of work. Jana was brilliant with figures, and her boss took advantage of that to further his own career.

She could feel the tension building inside her as she scanned the figures looping across the screen. She did the company payroll, so she knew that Jerry earned three times as much as she, and yet he often left the office early, and Mary Lou, the receptionist and office gossip, told her she was always putting through personal calls from one woman or another. Jana, on the other hand, worked diligently, but never seemed to get caught up. Besides payroll, she was in charge of accounts payable for her company, a seed grower with two hundred employees in three American states and two Canadian provinces.

And then there were the endless government forms. It was a rare weekend when she didn't take work home.

Jana had been top of her class in college, and had started her first job the Monday morning after she finished school. Lacey had begged her to go to university and become an accountant, but Jana just wanted to find a decent job, get married and have kids. So she opted for a college certificate in finance, finished with honors, married her high school boyfriend and started living her dream. She had done well in her job; not so well in her marriage.