‘Sorry you’ve got second prize,’ Patrick said. His voice was light, but something about his body language wasn’t.

‘Hey, you.’ I tugged at his sleeve. ‘Thank you for today. This is amazing.’

He nodded, and took a seat away from me on a massive boulder. After a while he said, ‘Do you wish he was here instead of me?’

There was something about the weight of our silence that meant I wasn’t surprised he’d picked the conversation back up.

‘No,’ I said, from where I balanced a few boulders away. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done to make you think that, but obviously that’s not true.’

‘What makes it obvious?’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘No.’

There was a good stretch of rock between us, so I couldn’t reach out and touch him like my instinct was telling me to. I couldn’t see his eyes beneath his sunglasses, either, but the edge to his voice was new.

‘Patrick,’ I said. ‘Every time Alexander has crossed my mind I’ve actually thought how much crappier this trip would have been with him. I can’t believe I get to be here with somebody so present. You’re twenty times the man he is, and I think I’m having some self-doubt where the blinkers are coming off and I can’t believe I ever thought being with him was a good idea. I didn’t know there was another way for a relationship to be.’

Patrick started to lift his sunglasses off his head to try and look at me properly, but the sun was so bright off the water he squinted and then decided against it.

‘That’s a nice thing to say,’ he said.

‘I mean it,’ I replied. ‘This is the best honeymoon ever.’

As soon as I’d said it I realized he couldn’t say it back, because this was probably the second best honeymoon he’d ever been on. It wasn’t that I was jealous about that, but I definitely did feel something. I suppose the trip was unfolding to make me realize so much about my life, in all the best ways, but I worried it wasn’t as transformative for him. I was having epiphany after epiphany and he was simply having a lovely time, and probably thinking about his wife whom he loved and missed.

‘You must think about your wife a lot,’ I said, deciding to test the waters on bringing her up.