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turned to Ruby. “So, maybe it won’t be long before you have a baby. Of course it would help if you found a man. If you leave it much longer I’ll be coming to your wedding in an urn.”
    Aunty Sylvia positively relished her role as surrogate Jewish mother, and unlike Ronnie, she made no apologies for it.
    “Sylvia, please,” Ronnie came back. “Right now, Ruby’s busy building her career. A man will come along when the time is right. The universe never gets these things wrong.”
    Ruby couldn’t quite make out what this statement meant. She decided there were two possibilities: either her mother and Clive had finally made a breakthrough in her therapy, and from now on Ronnie was going to stop making barbed comments about Ruby’s single status, or it was an indication that Ronnie found it easier to get impatient with her sister’s Jewish mothering than she did with her own.
    It turned out to be the latter. A couple of hours later, as Ruby and Aunty Sylvia were leaving, Ronnie tugged her daughter’s sleeve.
    “Don’t worry, darling,” she whispered. “Every night, without fail, I chant for a man for you.”
    She then slipped a slim square package into Ruby’s bag. “Open it when you get home,” she said.

Chapter 5

    Ruby lay in bed, gazing up at the shadows on her bedroom ceiling. So, at the age of thirty-two, she was going to have a baby brother or sister. How weird was that? The news still hadn’t quite sunk in. Would he or she look like her? What sort of a relationship would they have? She decided that since the age difference ruled out the traditional sibling relationship, she would take on the role of fun aunty figure—a bit like Aunty Sylvia, only more cool.
    If it was a girl, Ruby would take her out for “princess days.” When she became a teenager, the two of them would meet for lunch and gossip about their parents, who by then would be getting old and eccentric. Ruby would listen to all her boyfriend problems. From time to time she might even babysit for Ruby’s own children. If of course Ruby had any. That involved finding a man. Suppose she didn’t? Suppose it never happened? No, she absolutely mustn’t think like that.
    “I am ready to accept positive change in my life right now,” she whispered. “I am beautiful and vibrant in my uniqueness. I am a child of the universe who deserves to love and be loved. I am capable of finding love.”
    Ronnie’s package had contained a CD called
Discovering
Love Through Inner Empowerment
. It consisted of daily affirmations delivered by a softly spoken, impossibly sincere Texan woman whose directives were accompanied by warbling, atonal New Age music. According to the blurb on the cover, she had been “a sex worker for twenty years, until she pulled herself back from the brink and turned her life around.”
    Ruby had been about to throw the thing in a drawer and forget about it, but curiosity—fueled by there being nothing on TV—got the better of her. She found herself sliding the CD into the player.
    She listened for a couple of minutes before turning it off, snorting with cynicism and unable to believe that Ronnie, even with her mystical tendencies, could have fallen for this kind of claptrap.
    Now, here she was, half an hour later, lying in bed reciting the affirmations she’d just been sniggering at. She justified it in the same way she justified keeping a four-leaf clover in her purse or listening to Chanel’s astrological predictions. It was all harmless fun so long as you didn’t take it too seriously. And maybe, just maybe, affirmations weren’t so stupid. Perhaps, by repeatedly telling herself how great she was, she might improve her chances of meeting the man of her dreams.
     
    T HE NEXT MORNING , she called in at Fi’s, bearing croissants and
pains au chocolat
. She had an appointment at eleven with Jill McNulty, the hospital administrator in charge of St. Luke’s prenatal department, and Fi’s was on the way.
    She couldn’t