“It will just die,” I said. “The relationship will die. Two years apart is impossible.” And two years was an optimistic estimate of how much longer my Ph.D. would take. We could spend summers together, of course, and nine months out of the year apart. I started crying again. “I miss you so bad.”

“Maybe I should come there,” Sébastien said. The idea clearly terrified him. “But I need a year of experience before I try to land a job with a U.S. company. I can’t come there fresh out of school.”

“No,” I said. “You love what you’re doing. I can barely stand what I’m doing. I know the choice is clear.”

“I don’t want you to do anything you’ll be unhappy with,” Sébastien said. “I won’t ask you to do this.”

I stilled and huddled into myself. “You don’t want me to come back, do you? You don’t want to try to share your tiny apartment with me either.”

“No. No,” Sébastien said. “Are you crazy? Quit twisting things like that. I just don’t want you to be unhappy, and I’m afraid you’ll be unhappy.”

So was I. Paris and I—well, let’s just say we could still use some good couple’s therapy.

All through the night, two questions gnawed at me until I felt like one giant perforated ulcer, and they led to a horde of other questions, all of which seemed to be attacking me. The first was, what if it didn’t work? That is, what if I gave up a career, smiles, and sunshine for something that proved to be a flash in the pan? Could you know someone well enough in four months to uproot your life for him, or was this just another way of fleeing real relationships, rushing into something that could never work? Was I pretending to risk something for love when I was really just indulging in some romantic fantasy with an exotic foreigner? The tall, dark, handsome Frenchman, for God’s sake. If I changed his name to Raoul and made him a wealthy count, I could star in my own Harlequin. I knew I had read too many of those when I was growing up; they had given me a false idea of what was humanly possible.