Will you not call me back? I asked her via text message. I’ve made a mess of this. I’m desperate to speak to you.

Productivity at work remained impossible after I hit SEND. I glanced to my mobile nearly every ten seconds, turning the volume up on the ringer as high as it would go. Normally one to leave the device in my desk drawer when I went to meetings, I carried it with me, leaving it just at my elbow on the table. Short of showing up unannounced at her doorstep, it was my only connection to her.

Just after lunch, I heard my text alert, and startled like a madman, toppling a cup of pens on my desk. Hope bloomed, immediate and heavy, making it nearly impossible to breathe. It took no time at all to read it; my heart felt neatly punctured. Her message said, simply, Job hunting.

Typing furiously, I asked her, Darling, please call. Why didn’t you tell me what happened with Tony?

An hour passed. Two, three, five. She didn’t reply.

I interpreted it as the dismissal I knew she’d intended and turned off my phone to avoid the temptation to plead with her in an unending string of messages. Unable to work, I paced the hall like a lunatic, ignoring Tony’s furtive, guilty glances in my direction and Richard’s lingering, uncertain ones.

Almost as soon as I set foot in the door of my flat, I moved to the office, dialing her number. It rang once—my heart was lodged in my windpipe—and again, and finally a third time before she answered.

“Hi,” she said, her voice small and thin.

Nearly choking on my breath, I managed, “Ruby, dove.”

I could immediately picture her wince when she replied, “Please, don’t call me that.”

I sucked in a breath, pain radiating through my chest. “Of course, I’m sorry.”

She didn’t say anything in response.

“I wish you’d told me about your conversation with Tony,” I told her, absently folding a small piece of paper on my desk. “Darling, I had no idea it had gone that way.”

“I was going to tell you away from the office. I didn’t want to cry there.” She sniffed, cleared her throat, and then fell silent again. Her chatty disposition was notably absent, and the loss of it ached as if a branch of my lungs had been dissected away, leaving me slightly breathless. Indeed, other than the occasional sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, she was oddly silent; a part of me wondered if she was crying.

“All right, Ruby?” I asked quietly.

“I’m fine,” she murmured, “just going through some application forms.”

“Ah.” So my options were to talk to her while she was distracted, or lose this one connection I had to the woman I loved.

I told her about the fruitless dinner with Portia, and how in the end there wasn’t anything to discuss. I knew it as soon as I walked into the old flat. “I’m sure it felt awful for you.” I pressed my palm to my forehead, murmuring, “I can’t talk through all of this on the phone. I have so much to say.” I love you. I’ve been a fool. “Ruby, please just come to dinner.”

“I can’t,” she said, simply.

So, to keep her on the line, I spoke to her until I ran out of subjects, feeling bumbling and lost for the first time with her. I described my day of distraction, the walk home, the bland dinner I planned to prepare. I told her about my conversation with Max earlier in the day, that Sara was expecting a second baby already. I kept talking until I ran out of the normal subjects and babbled on about nothing: stocks, the new construction down on Euston Road, my relief at the lessening rain.

I wanted her to blame me, to rail. I wanted her to tell me all the ways in which I’d disappointed her. Her silence was terrifying because it was so unlike her. I would rather have a million angry words than a single moment of her reserve.

Her opinion and esteem were already fundamental for me, even after only a month. The simple truth was that I’d never felt both so known with her, and so wandering even a day without. She was unlike anyone.

But eventually, under the weight of her continued silence, I let her go, begging her to call me when she felt ready.

Two more days passed without word from her, and I was unable to get out of the house, craved nothing to eat, and imagined nothing could be better than sleeping for hours on end. I knew I was facing the type of blood-draining sadness I’d previously—or, rather, blissfully ignorantly—only imagined could be avoided by stoicism itself.

Ruby was the only woman I would ever want, and the prospect of having her in my life for only these past four weeks was so depressing it turned something sour inside me.