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I am thinking bout u, my ruby-chews I am thinking that I luv u! I need u. can’t breath without u. c u tonight. T xxxx

Ruby smiled tightly and switched off her phone. She was in a laundrette on the High Road, watching her underwear swirl slowly back and forth inside a gigantic tumble drier. The tumble drier at home was out of commission while the kitchen was being replaced and she’d been forced to bring her washing here. Not that she minded. She liked laundrettes. She liked the people who used laundrettes. She could relate to them. People who didn’t have washing machines tended not to have mortgages or children or jobs. They were students or OAPs or immigrants living in temporary accommodation. She liked the smell of laundrettes, the dry heat, the feeling of having nothing better to do than read a magazine for an hour. She liked the old-fashioned sign-age, the washing-powder machine; she liked being somewhere that was exactly the same today as it had been twenty years ago.

She opened her in-box and read Tim’s message again. She should reply, but she didn’t know what to say. She’d never told a man that she loved him before, even when she had. The thought of using those words fraudulently made her cringe. Once those words were uttered, everything changed. She would lose her power; he would expect more of her. But worse than that, Tim Kennedy would probably leave his wife.

Ruby had slept with married men before; she’d heard all the clichés about problematic marriages and unempathetic wives. A dozen men had told her how unhappy they were at home, how they only stayed for the children. But Tim was different. He really was unhappy. And he really would leave his wife. He’d leave her tonight. He’d leave her now. All Ruby needed to do was say the word. Tim Kennedy was in love, like no one had ever been in love with her before. He sent her text messages twenty times a day. He sent her flowers; he bought her jewellery. He’doffered her his heart on a cushion.

Tim was a stockbroker. He lived with Sophie, his wife, in a Georgian cottage in Hammersmith, a one-minute walk from the river. He’d been married only a year. They’d been together for five years before that. They had no children, but they had a bulldog called Mojo over which they’d signed a pre-nup. They’d just got back from a skiing holiday in Austria or Switzerland or somewhere like that, and they played a lot of tennis – in couples. Tim drank red wine and played squash and worried about his weight. Sophie, apparently, was very thin and went to the gym five nights a week, when she got home from her job as a retail director for a chain of furniture shops.

It was all too, too tedious for words. It was no wonder he was crazy about her. He’d never met anyone like her before in his life, and if it hadn’t been for the chain of events that had led to Ruby walking into the same Soho bar as him that night, and if she hadn’t been in the very particular state of mind that she’d been in that night, he never would have. They were from two different worlds.

He’d turned up at a club on the Holloway Road last week, fresh from work in his suit and tie, wedged himself between sweaty men in thin T-shirts and women with tattoos, a plastic cup of beer clutched in his hand, just to see her play. When she came off stage he’d looked at her in awe, eyes blinking, mouth unable to form the words he wanted to utter. ‘You’re brilliant,’ he’d managed eventually, ‘completely brilliant.’

He adored her. And Ruby had to admit, she quite liked it. It had been a long time since anyone had felt so strongly about her and it couldn’t have come at a better time. But she didn’t love him. She didn’t even particularly like him. She could just about stomach having sex with him. But right now, with everyone else in her life letting her down, with Toby selling the house, her mother fobbing her off, Con ignoring her and Paul abandoning her, Tim was all she had left, and Ruby needed him, more than she could bear to think.

She pressed reply and started to type:

thinking I might love you too. See you tonight xxx