We pull away from the pier. I force myself to take in my surroundings, looking everywhere except where Hugh is seated, which is on the same bench I am, but as far away from me as physically possible. He scoots away from me again, and I’m tempted to lift my arm and check and see if I remembered deodorant. I either smell, or he has put two and two together and figured out who I am. He won’t want to talk to me either. He thinks Millie hates him.

And he knows as well as I do that there can’t be that many marine biologists named Millie studying the Great Barrier Reef, can there? For once, I agree with Millie, cursing my mother under my breath for giving us such untraditional names. Millicent? What was she thinking? What happened to Rachel or Sarah or Hannah?

We leave the marina in our wake, the cluster of tall buildings and ships getting smaller and smaller. The mountains frame the background, huge and soft, trees rounding out their edges, so the peaks look like scales of a friendly dragon, and not like the jagged spines of a triceratops. As I relax into the rhythmic pounding of water against the side of the boat, I can’t help but smile. The water is crystal clear and where it meets the shore it turns a brilliant shade of aquamarine. The beaches of Cairns sparkle a bright white as we pull away. Grey rocks and palm trees dot the shore, swaying gently in the wind. People are already setting up chairs on the beach, and there’s a group playing volley-ball, sand spraying up around their feet as they run back and forth. Sandwiched between the vivid, electric blue sea and the lush, sloping mountains, Cairns is a tropical paradise.

But despite the view, the further we get from land the more my anxiety rises. Five days on a boat with Hugh Harris. Five days of not knowing how Millie’s surgery went. Five days of reckoning with the fact that I’m now single with hardly anything at home to return to, and that after being on a boat for five minutes I’m already happier than I have been in two years.

Vanessa and Miguel hand out instant coffee packets and pour hot water out of a tumbler. I accept both gratefully. The mix of the coffee and the sea breeze starts to clear my head. At some point I forget about Hugh. The water is bright blue and is getting choppier the further away from the marina we get. The waves have got a little bigger and the boat has leaned into a gentle swaying rhythm. I find myself smiling into the distance, at the swaying palm trees getting smaller and smaller.