Harry and I met when I started working for him just over eighteen months ago. The company I was working for had relocated to Edinburgh and I’d been made redundant. I’d spent a while looking for permanent jobs when an agency got in touch just before Christmas to say there was a vacancy at Sheridan’s, a company based five miles from home. The PA to the managing director had left and her replacement had just let them down. The MD, Harry Sheridan, was looking for someone who would work there for a month on a temporary basis with a view to a permanent job. He’d felt that was a more reliable way of judging whether someone was a good fit.

He’d asked the agency if I could come in for a couple of days, just after Christmas, while it was quiet. That first morning I arrived, he and I were the only two in the office. The receptionist had sent me up to the third floor and Harry was waiting for me in the elevator lobby. He was tall with cropped fair hair, and dressed casually in jeans and sweater. He looked nice enough, pretty ordinary really, until he smiled. Then everything changed.

“Hi.” He shook my hand. “I’m Harry Sheridan.”

“Ruby Dean.”

“Thanks for coming in. I thought it would be better to bring you in this week while it’s quiet, so that I can go through some things with you. I hope it’s not spoiled your Christmas break.”

“Not at all.” Actually I was happy to be up and out of the house; the atmosphere had been toxic for days. Tom and I had had an argument, one that left me hot with shame and embarrassment afterward. We hadn’t spoken to each other for several days and when I got up to go to work, I could see he was dying to know where I was going. He wouldn’t ask, though, and I wasn’t going to tell him until he did.

Harry took me into his office suite and showed me around. His office overlooked fields at the back of the building and there was a window between his room and the outer office where I learned I would sit with a woman called Sarah, who worked for another director. It was two days after Christmas and the office was full of Christmas lights and half-empty tins of chocolates.

We sat in his room drinking coffee while he talked about the business and how it had started up.