The new story begins...

Working Title: Four Janes

The first one was the hardest. I didn't really know what I was doing then, and it was more of an impulse than anything else. When it all worked out the way I had envisioned, that's when the trouble really started.

WE'd been married three years, two months and seventeen days, and I had exactly seven days and ten hours before I was to present for the final time to the PhD thesis committee.
She wanted to talk.
This was not uncommon, and on any given day I would have been more than willing to sit and talk to her. She was a great confversationalist, even if some of her other traits were growing irksome. However, lately the conversations were becoming increasingly stilted and irritating.

You see, she wanted to start a family, have lots of little brats running around breaking things and making messes. Truthfully, I don't think I'd make a very good parent. I don't like children, I don't like when things move from where I put them. I can sit in my study for hours or even days at a time working on a problem and not noticing the time. And I like quiet.
So, I simply could not let her continue to romanticize about having children. I didn't have time to talk to her about why it was a bad idea, and I could not let her dreams come true. It would have been a disaster!
So I did the only thing I could. I took care of the problem, finished my thesis in peace, and took a professorial position in the history department at NYU - where I'd dreamt of teaching since I was an undergrad - and I went on with my life.

Our car was in the shop, having the windshield replaced and the engine tund up, so I rented one from the service station and had all of the information put in my name. The man who rented me the car warned me about the faulty defroster, but I told him that I rarely drive except short trips, so we decided it would be alright.
I didn't pass on the warning when Patti took the car. She was having dinner with her sister and I asked her to stop and pick up some extra typing paper for me on her way home.
When the temperature dropped and the fog rolled in less than an hour after she left, I knew I was in luck. The drunk driver who got lost on our street couldn't have turned out better if I had planned it. He didn't know where he was, and was on the wrong side of the road when she came out of the curve.
She died on impact. He's been in jail ever since.

I do miss her every now and then. She really was great to talk to, always ready to support reasonable ideas, or to intelligently debate a point she didn't agree with. We had graduated together from Harvard, and while I'd been studying European history, she'd been studying philosophy, so we could quite often share notes on how certain beliefs and practices developed.
That woman could reasearch like no one I'd ever seen before, and had a curiosity that could not be stemmed. But she talked too much and I just couldn't go on any longer.
It's not really so difficult to understand.
I just needed quiet. She knew that.