As I say yes, I see, I understand, I think of Browning’s line: ‘I listened with heart fit to break’.

‘It’s a very difficult situation,’ says Vivien, the counsellor. ‘I’ve never come across anything like this before. I think . . . I think you have to just let some things rest.’

‘Yes.’

Tears come hotly and quickly again. So many tears. How could I have so many in me? I apologise and Vivien says not to.

‘Tears are good things, honey. They’ve got a natural opiate in them.’

She’s gloriously, blousily hippy-herbal. I tell her about my dad. She says he obviously needs to know about the therapeutic qualities of tears and that he’s a typical, older Australian male stuck in the 1950s who can’t express his emotions. She says he’s calcified stuck by that lake and not to take his words to heart. She says I’m doing fine. We laugh.

I tell her about the strange feeling I’ve been getting, in quiet moments, that Max is with me, tenderly close. I tell her about lying on my belly on a bed, and feeling him gently lie on top of me for a moment and close his eyes serenely and then be gone.

‘Are you on ecstasy?’

‘What?’

‘Are you on ecstasy?’ The taxi driver asks again, on the way to Hobart airport.

‘No. Why?’

‘It’s just that whenever someone gets into my cab and they’re on ecstasy, I start breathing really deep, and with you, I don’t know, I started breathing really deeply.’

I laugh softly. He doesn’t get an explanation.

‘Your presence is just like, wow, amazing.’

I settle back into my seat. There’s a new calmness through me. I feel older and stronger, I feel as though something has deepened within me. At the airport toilet I look in the toothpaste-spattered mirror. The knot between my eyebrows has smoothed away and the rawness in my eyes has gone. I feel as though I’m getting my face back.

Clouds taunt me during the sunset flight home. They look like ice as the plane skims over them. I imagine Max’s soul dipping and soaring over the ice and rock and snow. I think of the faith that is helping to pull me through, the belief that he’s out there, somewhere. I remember a phrase I’d heard once: God gave us the gift of suffering. I have to find a gift in what’s happened, God knows how. I reckon it’s got something to do with finding a quietness of the soul. And moving on in a way Max would want me to.

But how?