Let me sit inside that week with you for a moment, because I skated over it for years when I told this story, said only "he didn't answer" and moved on, the way you hurry past a thing that still stings. But the week was the whole point. I was in the most beautiful place I had ever stood, with nothing required of me and nowhere I had to be, and I spent it the way an addict spends a week in a locked ward: pacing, checking, negotiating with the clock.
I developed rituals. If I didn't look at the phone until I'd made coffee, he'd have written by the time I looked. If I walked to the far café and back without checking, there'd be a message waiting like a reward. I made these bargains with a universe that was not listening, and I lost every one. Each loss cost me a small coin of the self I had left. By the fourth day I was standing on that balcony over the geraniums, running the terrible arithmetic that the abandoned know by heart.
Maybe his phone broke. Maybe there's a family thing. Maybe I said something. Maybe the smiley face was too much. Maybe I am, at bottom, in some way I have always suspected, not a person who gets met. And the sea was doing its enormous blue work forty feet away, and I did not see it. I had crossed the world and brought the treadmill in my carry-on.