“So, it ended because she didn’t want a long-distance relationship?”

James travelled all the time. I knew that being with him meant enduring the trials of a long-distance relationship even if we shared a home base. I’d thought about it a lot over the past few months, and I’d decided it would be okay. I could do it. I could do regular bouts of being apart.

That sigh again and my nerves turned to nausea. Then he replied. “No, it ended because I didn’t want a long-distance relationship. I wanted her with me all the time.”

All the clichés about the moment you learn something that changes everything—that time almost stands still, that you feel every emotion at once, that you feel sick and exposed and divorced from your body—are true.

And his simple, honest, heart-wrenching reply changed everything.

All I could say was, “Oh,” but I’m sure it spoke volumes.

Without discussing it further, we did the things people do on the morning of an overnight boat trip on Milford Sound—as though we hadn’t just come to an impasse.

We got dressed and went up on deck in time to see the sunrise—well, the sun lightening the sky. In the sound, there were steep mountains on either side of the water screening the horizon from us mere mortals. But to say that it was “epic” would have been an understatement. I’m sure the word was created for moments like that sunrise, but it’s been misappropriated so often to describe a red-carpet dress, or an episode of a TV show, or even a burger, that it was not enough.

The light seemed like an entity in itself, as though, if I reached out far enough, I could touch it. The sky above the eastern mountains graduated upward from milky blue to robin’s-egg blue and streams of sunlight shot out from behind the mountains as though they were wearing a giant crown of light.

And true to New Zealand’s moniker as “the Land of the Long White Cloud”, or “Aotearoa” in Maori, there were these incredibly low long clouds winding through the sound. They looked like the fake snow people put on their windowsills at Christmas time—dense, fluffy tendrils hovering just above the water.

That I could observe all of this, that I could wonder at the incredible natural beauty surrounding us while my heart was being squeezed in a vice, was a minor miracle. And I held on to that miracle, so I wouldn’t have to think about the inevitable conversation that would end us.

When it came, we were back in our cabin, packing in a silence so stifling I couldn’t bear it any longer.

“I wish—” I said.

“I’m sorry—” he said at the same time.

We both stopped. I took a trembling breath.

“You go ahead,” he said quietly.

I let out my breath as slowly as I could, my insides in turmoil. “I wish I wanted that life. Your life.” I glanced up to see him nod, then sit heavily on the end of the bed. There was so much more I wanted to say, but I knew I couldn’t say it without looking him in the eye. I went to the door, turned, and leant against it. James looked up at me. There was something in his gaze, in those kind eyes, that emboldened me to speak the truth, my truth.