Emmerdale airs more emotional scenes for Ruby Fox-Miligan next week as her husband Caleb finds out about her secret DNA test.
Ruby is put on the spot when Caleb stumbles across the results at home and seeks an explanation over what she’s hiding.
The ITV soap recently explored Ruby’s traumatic past, as an emotional flashback episode revealed that her father Anthony sexually abused her when she was a child.
Ruby suspects that Anthony could be the biological father of her daughter Steph. She has since arranged a DNA test to find out whether the results rule out Caleb as the father or not.
Although Ruby has confided in her sister-in-law Chas Dingle with some of the story, she hasn’t shared the distressing details of Anthony’s involvement.
Next week, Ruby receives the DNA test results but stuffs them into her handbag when Caleb returns home suddenly.
Ruby then spends the rest of the day agonising over what the results might show. She once again confides in Chas, who suggests that Caleb won’t turn his back on his family regardless of the outcome.
Despite these words of encouragement, Ruby wonders whether it’s best to simply destroy the letter without ever looking at what the results say.
The emotional situation comes to a head when Caleb searches through Ruby’s handbag for painkillers.
He finds the envelope containing the results and is baffled by the implications of Ruby organising the test.
As Caleb tries to find out what’s going on, how much will Ruby share with him? And could the Miligans’ marriage be impacted by what the results show?
Beth Cordingly, who plays Ruby, explained: “She’s like a deer stuck in the headlights in that moment. He is standing there looking at her, and until he says what the results are, she has no idea herself.
“So it’s not even just the situation of walking in and finding out someone has found something that you didn’t want them to find. On top of that is the bombshell that she doesn’t know what’s in it.
“So it’s like this unexploded bomb he’s holding – that he now knows the answer to, and no-one else in the whole world knows. So she just doesn’t really know what to do.
“I remember filming it, I remember exactly the feeling when I was standing there looking at him, thinking: ‘There’s so much going on’. All it says on the DNA test is whether Caleb is the father or not.”
She continued: “It’s going to be emotional. Caleb is aware that there’s only really one other person on the scene at that time, her friend Rob that her dad keeps talking about, who we saw in the flashback episode.
“It’s only her and the audience that know he is gay. That’s something that I think is really lovely that they’ve put in for Ruby – that is just a nice little thing that’s never really mentioned, is the fact that she never, ever, at times when she could, she never says to her dad he was gay.”
Emmerdale airs these scenes on Wednesday, January 15 and Thursday, January 16 on ITV1 and ITVX.