On Saturday night we walked for miles through the streets of Paris. I don’t know whether we thought nobody would recognize us or whether we just didn’t care by then, but we were holding hands and it would’ve been clear to anyone that we were a couple. When we arrived back at our hotel, Harry pulled me to him just before we reached the door.

“Ruby, I’ve got something to say to you.” He kissed me. “I love you.”

Just as it had a hundred times since I met him, my stomach flipped. “I know,” I said. “You’ve told me that before.”

He laughed. “I tell you every day.”

He was right. He did.

“But it’s different now. This isn’t enough for me, just seeing you at work and whenever Tom goes away. I want us to be together.” He looked so serious. “What do you think?”

I felt as though I was taking a huge leap into a void. I took a deep breath. “I want to be with you, too.”

“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s make it happen.”

And that was the night we planned it, that in a month, on the day that Emma’s sister, Jane, was leaving work, Harry and I would go to our homes and I’d tell my husband and he’d tell his wife that we were leaving home.

CHAPTER 29

Emma

Of course, what I hadn’t taken into account was that I’d become pregnant.

Harry and I had been together for twenty years, since we met at university. Back in those days I had contraception nailed down tightly. The very last thing I’d wanted was to have a baby. I wanted to work, to have the freedom to travel and see friends. A baby would only get in the way of that and luckily Harry felt exactly the same. Once we hit our midtwenties and our friends started to have children, we decided to have one ourselves. We thought it would be the easiest thing in the world.

It was such a shock to discover it wasn’t. After a couple of years we had fertility tests—those were a joy, I can tell you—and we were both found to be fertile. The doctors called it unexplained infertility; everything was in working order but I just wasn’t getting pregnant. We had three attempts at IVF, but nothing happened except bitter disappointment. I think it affected Harry more than me, really. In the early days, whenever those feelings of utter, utter broodiness hit him, he’d get up and do something. He’d run miles in the middle of the night and work fourteen-hour days so that he wouldn’t have time to think about it. That’s when his business really took off. All of his efforts went into it.