talk to Harry, to ask for his advice. We’d spent so much time talking and he’d always been able to calm my nerves.
Sarah would leave the office to pick up her kids from school at three o’clock each day and at five past, Harry would usually appear in the doorway.
“Fancy a coffee?” he’d say.
His smile . . . there was something about him that drew me to him and when he smiled, it was as though everything lit up in me. I couldn’t stop myself. I knew it was wrong but honestly, from the moment I met Harry I felt warm. Loved. I thought we’d known everything about each other and yet I hadn’t known that his wife, Emma, was pregnant.
“I don’t have any children,” I told him, the first time we spoke about our families. “But Tom has a child. He was married before, to Belinda, and they had Josh. He’s seventeen now.”
“A stepson, eh? What’s that like?”
“He’s great. We had some difficult times when he was a bit younger.” I laughed. “Just the usual teenage angst. But then Tom started to work away some weekends, so Josh would come and stay with me.”
Harry had frowned. “Couldn’t he stay at home with his mum those weekends and come another time?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t worth the argument. Tom said Belinda wanted time with her new husband, Martin. He said she was struggling to cope with work and taking care of Josh. And Tom and Belinda weren’t talking for a long time, so it was easier if Josh just came along at the same time each week. They were both pretty rigid with their arrangements. Well, it’s hard to be flexible when you’re not talking.”
“And didn’t you mind?”
“I thought I would,” I said, “but I grew to love him. And we got on well, too—better than he did with Tom, really.”
I could see Harry hesitate and I knew what he was going to ask me. It’s what everyone feels free to ask a woman of my age: Do you wish you had children of your own?
I preempted him. “I wanted children, but it didn’t work out that way. I would have loved to have had them, though.”
“There’s plenty of time. You’re still young.”
“I hope I do,” I said. “It’s just never happened for us.” I hesitated, then decided to tell him; there was something about Harry that made me want to tell him everything. “I have been pregnant, though. I had a miscarriage before I met him. When I was eighteen.”
He winced. “You poor thing.”
I couldn’t talk about that. I never had. I think if I’d had a baby since, I would have been okay, but that memory of losing my only child was like having a painful tooth; I couldn’t help probing it but each time the pain overcame me.
Harry was quiet then and I wondered about him and his wife, Emma. They had no children but I didn’t want to ask him whether that was what they wanted. It seemed intrusive. It was nothing to do with me. I knew how much I would hate it if someone were to ask Tom whether I could have children. I cringed at the thought of that: the way people asked questions as though they deserved an answer, never thinking that their idle curiosity might mean pain for someone else.
My phone rang and I jumped, thinking it was Josh calling for a chat; then when I saw an unfamiliar number, I thought it might be someone responding to my job applications. I put on my best possible telephone voice. “Hello, this is Ruby Dean.” There was a muffled noise on the line and I wondered for a moment if someone had misdialed. I said again, “Hello, this is Ruby Dean.”
A man spoke. His voice was low and he sounded unsure of himself. “Are you free tonight?”
“What?”
“Tonight. Are you free? Around seven?”
Stupidly, I said, “Free for what?”
“To meet up,” he said.
I frowned. That was a pretty odd way of going about an interview.