Brody was wreathed in hope, his face alight with expectation. No commitments. No contracts. No debt. Nothing holding him back. His words rang in my ears. How could I rain on his happiness parade?

I couldn’t believe the mess I was in. At my age I should be quilting, golfing, scrapbooking and possibly mastering calligraphy while contemplating my vegie patch, not angsting over the paternity of an unplanned pregnancy. Usually when my life fell apart, I took to cooking with wine – only forgetting to add any food. But what the hell was I going to do this time? Mind you, foetal alcohol syndrome was about the only drama missing from this whole surreal scenario. I didn’t want to tell him about my positive pregnancy test, the one test you can’t cheat on, until I’d made up my own mind. Last night I had been determined to terminate it, but today I found myself vacillating.

Could I really keep it? Was I too old? Fifty-year-old men have babies all the time, so why not women, too? And, as the potential father, wouldn’t Brody also want to have a say? But how could I tell the man I’d known intimately for only three weeks that I wasn’t peri-menopausal after all, but possibly carrying his child? The man who was just rejoicing at having no commitments. And what if it came out of the womb carrying a spanner instead of a stethoscope? How could I say all this succinctly? There just didn’t seem to be a Hallmark card to cover it.

‘You are allowed to be happy,’ Brody said, in his gentlest, most hypnotically soothing voice.

Finally I found my voice. ‘A few months ago I was leading a soft, gentle, safe little life. Now look at me! I’ve been misdiagnosed with cancer, alienated all my friends and family, fallen in love, found out my husband is sleeping with my sister, and discovered my mother’s dead body,’ I said, in a voice just one decibel shy of histrionics.

‘A woman of your magnificence is never broken, Ruby, only bent. Run away with me and I’ll straighten you out,’ he said lasciviously, eyes twinkling.

I squeezed his hand. ‘The world needs more good men like you.’

‘No.’ He squeezed my hand back. ‘It needs more bad women like you.’

Realising that I wasn’t showing the right level of enthusiasm at his sexy suggestions, I made my mouth twitch into what I hoped was a smile, but felt more like a grimace. What on earth was I going to say to him? I took a few mental runs at this conundrum, but felt like a pole-vaulter who kept smacking her forehead on the crossbar. And so, in desperation, I settled on something ambiguous. I focused my eyes on the midriff buttons of Brody’s linen shirt, kept them there and said, lamely, ‘There are complications.’