Breakfast was hard to swallow – literally and figuratively. I couldn’t shift the gnawing thought that we were no longer counting down to the end of the trip in days. Now it was hours. Nine hours, to be precise. My throat was tight with the anticipation of saying goodbye. Goodbye to Greece, goodbye to Josh, and goodbye to the version of Sarah I’d been over the previous week and a half. Pretty soon I would be back in Sydney, tethered again to a life I wasn’t sure I wanted.

Josh-less.

No wonder it was hard to choke down dry sweet cake and a hard-boiled egg. Josh had gone equally quiet and I wondered for the thousandth time what he was thinking. Whatever it was, it was weighing heavily, because there was a crease between his eyebrows. Maybe he sensed my disappointment at all those things he’d said the night before. Maybe? Who was I kidding? I am sure it was all over my face.

I sipped my crappy instant coffee. Yuk. ‘Ready to go?’ I wiped my mouth on the napkin and left it on the plate of barely eaten food. I stood up to leave without waiting for an answer and heard his chair scrape across the floor as I exited the dining room.

Back in our room, we both busied ourselves with packing. Busy, busy, busy! We were both so incredibly busy, as we failed to acknowledge the bloated, fat, purple elephant in the room.

‘Josh,’ I started.

‘Sarah,’ he said at the exact same time. Then we did the thing that two people do when there’s tension and they both want to speak, but they also both want to be polite. ‘Go ahead.’ ‘No, please, you …’ And then we stared at each other for a moment, both holding our respective breaths, waiting for the other to say something.

Josh broke the silence. ‘I said some stuff to you last night, and I think it might have upset you.’

You think? My mind went into sarcastic overdrive. Then I shrugged as though I didn’t know what he was talking about. He called me out. ‘Sarah, please don’t pretend. I shouldn’t have voiced those things to you.’

‘What, all that stuff about how amazing I am?’ Was that anger in my voice? Was I angry? I was. Under the sadness, I was completely pissed off.

‘No, no, of course not. You are amazing. I meant that – you are the most interesting, incredible person I’ve ever met.’

Liar. ‘But?’

‘There is no but. That’s the whole point. I should have just left it at that. All my doubts about me and you and what I want, and what this can be. That’s …’ He stopped talking and it looked like he was having a pretty intense chat with himself, a chat that continued for a few seconds.