He was distressed. He told me he had left M’s flat and was now wandering around, lost and not really knowing where he was.
I told him I was at the station. I had changed my flight and was waiting for a train to the airport.
He started crying.
He said he didn’t know what he was doing. He tried to explain that he had felt overwhelmed at the party. It wasn’t only M, he said. Apparently, my sister’s children had also been asking him to help them talk to their dad about some family problems. He had felt pulled in different directions, responsible for everyone, unable to cope with it all.
I couldn’t understand what any of that had to do with what had happened.
How did feeling overwhelmed explain why my cousin was lying in his arms?
How did it explain leaving the house with her?
How did it explain ignoring me while I begged him to come back?
We argued through tears, each of us trying to explain a completely different version of the same night.
And then he said he was going to find the nearest bridge and throw himself off it.
Everything in me changed instantly.
Minutes earlier, I had been leaving him.
I had changed my flight. Packed my suitcase. Walked through the quiet suburban streets as a new day dawned. I had finally removed myself from a situation that had become unbearable.
Now none of that mattered.
Whatever he had done to me, I couldn’t leave him wandering around Denmark talking about killing himself.
I told him to send me his location.
Then, at 6:40, a message appeared.
“Can you see where I am?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Why don’t you answer my calls.”
A few minutes later, another message arrived.
“I know it won’t mean much now, if anything….”
“I Love You and I am sorry.”
And there it was again.
Even after everything that had happened during the night, I loved him.
“I love you too,” I replied, “but there will always be times you find something else more important that you forget about considering me.”
By then, I had made my decision.
I wasn’t going to the airport.
Not yet.
I withdrew some cash from the ATM, hailed a taxi and put my suitcase in the boot. Within fifteen minutes, I was being driven away from the station and back towards the man I had spent the entire night begging to come back to me.
I found him standing beside a lake in a quiet suburb, smoking.
I got out of the taxi and looked at him.
He looked terrible.
So must I.
We were both exhausted, our faces swollen and our eyes full of tears. Seeing him again hurt in a way I find difficult to describe. This was still Stephen. The man I loved. The man I had travelled here with. The man who, only hours earlier, had been part of my family celebration.
And yet something enormous now stood between us.
We looked at each other and I think, for a moment, we both understood that.
I paid the driver, took my suitcase from the boot and went to him.
Then the questions came pouring out of me.
Why did you leave with her?
He said M had become upset and run off. He had chased after her to find out what was wrong. When she insisted on walking home, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her alone.
“But what about me?”
He said he hadn’t been able to think about me. All he could think about was M being distressed and needing to make sure she was safe.
I stared at him.
There had been so many other choices.
He could have shouted for my help.
He could have woken my aunt.
He could have called me immediately and my aunt could have picked them up.
He could have called M a taxi.
He could have persuaded her to come back inside.
He could have walked part of the way and then returned.
He could have answered his phone and listened when I told him that I was falling apart.
He could have done almost anything other than what he had done.
He said none of those things had occurred to him.
All he had been able to think about was looking after her.
I felt something twist inside me.
“What about my distress?”
He told me that when I threatened to end the relationship if he didn’t come back, it had made him angry.
It was almost impossible to comprehend.
I had been pleading because I was terrified of losing him.
And somehow my terror had pushed him further away.
I still needed to know what had happened once they reached her flat.
“Where did you sleep?”
He said he had got into M’s bed because the flat was so small. Surely there was a sofa?
My stomach dropped.
“What happened then?”
He told me that M had undressed down to her underwear and got into bed beside him.
I could feel the anger rising through me, but I needed to keep asking.
I needed to know.
“What happened next?”
He hesitated.
Then he told me he had tried to kiss her.
For a moment, I could barely process the words.
I had spent the entire night listening to him tell me that he was only walking her home because she was vulnerable. That he couldn’t abandon her. That he was looking after her.
Now he was telling me that once he got her home, he climbed into her bed and tried to kiss her. How is that behaviour protecting her?
“Why?”
His answer stunned me.
He said he was in bed with an attractive, almost naked woman. Wanting to kiss her had felt natural.
Then he said something else.
“You told me we were finished.”
I stared at him.
Was he seriously using that as a justification?
I had told him our relationship would be over if he didn’t come back. I hadn’t ended our relationship and released him into the night to do whatever he wanted. I had been distraught, pleading with him to turn around. I had said those words because nothing else was working. I was trying desperately to make him understand what was at stake.
I had wanted the possibility of losing me to stop him.
Instead, he seemed to have taken it as permission to continue.
“But you knew why I said that,” I told him. “You knew I was begging you to come back.”
There was no answer that could make it make sense.
And I couldn’t believe I was hearing any of this from the same man who had once told me that sharing a bed with another woman meant nothing. The same man who had insisted he could lie beside a woman without anything sexual happening because he had self-control.
I had believed him.
Now that old argument came crashing back into the present.
Another reassurance that suddenly meant nothing.
Another thing I had trusted because I wanted to believe him.
Still I kept asking.
Perhaps some part of me was waiting for the piece of the story that would hurt less.
Perhaps I wanted him to tell me that, at the final moment, he had remembered me.
That he had looked at M and thought of us.
That he had stopped because he loved me.
“Why did you leave?”
His answer took even that away.
M hadn’t wanted things to go any further than the kiss.
So he decided he should leave.
I felt sick.
He hadn’t left because he remembered me.
He hadn’t left because he suddenly understood what he was doing.
He hadn’t stopped himself.
She had stopped it.
I couldn’t understand how we had got here.
How had we travelled from the year we had just shared to this lake in Denmark, standing beside my suitcase and smoking cigarettes while Stephen explained to me how he had tried to kiss my cousin?
There were more questions. Hundreds of them.
But we were both exhausted beyond reason.
I messaged my aunt and told her where we were. I asked whether she could come and collect us.
The drive back was silent, the three of us sitting with the hollow, exhausted feeling that something terrible had happened and none of us knew what could possibly be said to make it any less real.
When we arrived, my aunt was quiet but kind to us both. There was so much that needed to be said, but none of us had the energy left to say it.
I changed my flight back to the original booking.
I wasn’t leaving after all.
Then Stephen and I went to the guest room.
Only hours earlier, I had walked away from that house believing I might never return to it with him.
Now we were back in the same bed.
I lay with my back to him.
I was so desperately sad.
Not angry anymore. Not frantic. Just broken-hearted.
I cried quietly into the pillow.
I wanted him to reach for me.
After everything that had happened, after everything I had heard, some part of me still wanted the comfort of the person who had caused the pain.
But he didn’t touch me.
He didn’t put an arm around me.
He didn’t tell me he was sorry.
He didn’t comfort me at all.
Eventually, exhaustion took us both and we slept for a couple of hours.
When we woke, M was trying to contact him.
That was when I discovered they had exchanged numbers.
Another question.
When?
Why?
At what point during that night had exchanging numbers seemed necessary?
I was furious that he took her call. He could barely speak to me without becoming overwhelmed, yet he was willing to speak to her.
We eventually got up and went outside.
We sat in my aunt’s garden, eating and drinking almost nothing, chain-smoking in near silence. Our eyes were swollen from crying. Everything around us looked exactly as it had the day before, and yet nothing felt remotely the same.
I asked him again.
Calmer this time.
I wasn’t shouting. I wasn’t pleading.
I simply wanted to understand.
Why had he done this?
He told me about Scotland.
During his recent trip there, he said, he had stayed awake all night talking to a young man who was considering suicide. Stephen had spent hours trying to convince him not to take his own life. He said the experience had taken an enormous emotional toll on him and, because we had flown to Denmark almost immediately afterwards, he hadn’t had time to recover.
Then there had been the party.
My sister’s children had apparently been asking him to intervene with their father over family problems. I hadn’t considered how much it affected him at the time.
And then there was M.
Stephen believed she was a troubled young woman, possibly with the same diagnosis as him. He said people with similar difficulties could recognise something in each other and be drawn together.
I listened.
These were explanations.
They weren’t excuses.
And there was one question I couldn’t get past.
If he was emotionally and physically exhausted, why hadn’t he come to bed with me?
Why hadn’t he removed himself from everything that was overwhelming him and come to the person he had travelled to Denmark with?
Why hadn’t he come to me? The woman whom he loved. The woman who could support and comfort him.
He didn’t know.
That seemed to happen whenever I reached the question underneath all the other questions.
He could explain the circumstances.
He could explain M’s distress.
He could explain Scotland.
He could explain my sister’s children.
He could explain feeling overwhelmed.
But when I asked the question that mattered most to me—
Why did you choose to leave me and go with her?
—there was no answer.
M arrived that afternoon.
She wanted to speak to me alone, so the two of us walked out through the front of the house and sat on a bench opposite.
I remember surprisingly little of that conversation.
Perhaps by then I had simply reached the limit of what I could absorb.
I asked her what had happened at the flat. Her account seemed to corroborate Stephen’s. But, like him, whenever I asked questions that moved away from what happened and towards why, she became distressed and confused.
Before long, we were talking about her father’s suicide, her mental health and the way the family had never really spoken about what had happened.
I understood her pain.
And somehow, sitting on that bench opposite my aunt’s house less than a day after she had disappeared into the night with my partner, I found myself comforting her.
I was devastated.
I had barely slept.
My relationship felt as though it had been ripped open in front of my family.
And still, when someone else cried, something in me automatically moved towards their pain.
The rest of that day is hazy.
At some point Stephen spoke briefly to M alone, although they remained within my sight. I remember wondering what they were saying to each other.
Then she left.
As the day wore on, my sadness began turning back into anger.
I was angry with Stephen for allowing any of this to happen.
I was angry with both of them for behaving as though I had somehow disappeared from the equation.
My aunt naturally felt protective of M, but she was also angry with Stephen. Before long, the two of us were questioning him together.
He looked frightened.
Overwhelmed.
Confused.
Eventually I realised there was nowhere left for the conversation to go.
We had to stop.
My aunt prepared a beautiful dinner that evening, but none of us could really eat it.
We sat around the table with everything that had happened hanging silently between us.
The celebration was over.
The excitement of Denmark was gone.
The easy happiness Stephen and I had arrived with only days earlier felt impossibly far away.
Eventually we went to bed.
There were still so many questions I wanted answered.
There were still things about that night that didn’t make sense.
But there was nothing left in me with which to ask them.
We went to bed in silence.
The following morning, we would begin the journey back to England.
Together.
But something had happened in Denmark that neither of us could simply pack into a suitcase and leave behind.
