Ruby looked at the photos on Rachel’s dressing table. She looked at her computer that hadn’t been switched on. The maple-wood desk held rows of framed photos of babies gurgling, an elderly couple on a sofa, a hard-bodied man playing with a wrinkly puppy in front of a fire.

“Is this your family?” asked Ruby.

Rachel steered her away from the desk. “No.”

“Oh. Well, who are they?”

“Those are just prints from photo sessions I did.”

“You’re a photographer?’

“Yes.”

“And these are the pictures you’re proudest of?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, why aren’t they on your walls, blown up big? Why are they on your desk, by your computer, in these funny little ornate frames?”

“They’re not funny. They’re solid silver.”

“Whatever. Why are they so small? When you make something stay small, that means you really care about it. You want to be able to carry it with you if you have to flee on foot. Why do you care about a model you posed in front of a fire or some old people you don’t even know?”

Rachel didn’t answer. Ruby walked around the room, touching things. She absentmindedly ran her stubby fingers through a bowl of chocolate nonpareils, as though mistaking them for the hair of a lover. She opened a cigarette case and took a pink Sobranie to play with. She held it grandly between two fingers as she leafed through magazines and plucked books from the shelves. Rachel felt it more sharply when Ruby touched her photos and her books than when she had touched her back. Hands clenched in discomfort, she walked into the kitchen to put the kettle on. When she came back, Ruby was trying on her new Gucci trenchcoat. She looked like a child prostitute hidden in the folds of a pervert’s raincoat.

She took it off and, though she tried to hang it back up, it was all wrong and Rachel had to tell her. Rachel eyed her hacked hair; her body that went in and out in all the wrong places; her chewed lips and nails. “You. You are all wrong.”

“I know!” Ruby squealed with delight at the recognition. Overexcited, she sank into the sofa, a dark look bleeding across her face.

Rachel turned the hanger so that the coat was facing the same way as all her others, a rod of down-filled Gucci. “What do you eat?”

Ruby had a fistful of chocolates in her red mouth. “Nothing,” she said, a nonpareil slipping down her chin.

“You don’t look like you eat nothing.” Rachel paused long enough to decide she needn’t say the next sentence, then said it anyway. “I don’t think you should be eating quite so many of those.” Her tone was that of an underpaid, over-age babysitter.