For a few seconds after waking, there was nothing.
Then I remembered.
It hadn’t all been some awful dream. It was real.
And now Stephen and I had to make the long journey back to England with the unspoken knowledge that our relationship was over.
My aunt had already left for work. We had been asked to lock up behind us and meet her in the town centre to hand over the keys and say goodbye.
Stephen and I dragged our suitcases through the streets to the nearest bus stop. We stood there waiting, barely uttering a word to each other.
When the bus arrived, we found some seats and I stared out of the window.
The streets of Denmark passed by — a country that had always meant so much to me, filled with childhood memories and family and belonging. Just days earlier, I had been standing in these same streets believing I was here with the man I loved, surrounded by the people I loved.
Now I could barely comprehend what had happened.
Tears filled my eyes.
Stephen remained silent.
About half an hour later, the bus pulled into the terminal and there was my aunt waiting for us. She smiled when she saw me, but I could read the sympathy all over her face.
I hugged her and thanked her. I probably apologised too, although I can’t remember exactly what I said. Everything felt embarrassing somehow, even though I had done nothing wrong. I hated that something so private and devastating had unfolded in front of my family.
We went into the station and waited for the train to the airport. It was the same station I had been standing in twenty-four hours earlier, frantically trying to understand what Stephen and M might be doing.
Now there was nothing left to chase.
On the train, I stared numbly through the window as Denmark’s flat, beautiful landscape rushed past.
Stephen still said almost nothing.
At the airport we boarded our plane and took our seats beside one another. Those cramped airline seats suddenly felt unbearably intimate. I could feel Stephen’s shoulder and arm against mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.
I tried to imagine that the man sitting beside me was a stranger.
Ironically, that was almost exactly how he felt.
Somewhere during that flight, the numbness began to wear off.
The reality of what had happened started pushing its way through, and I began to cry. I tried desperately to hide it, turning my head away and keeping as quiet as I could, but eventually I was sobbing silently and couldn’t stop.
Stephen knew.
He did nothing that was helpful.
I don’t remember much about landing in England. We retrieved my car and began the journey home. We must have spoken at some point, but I can’t remember a single thing we said.
I probably told him I was taking him back to his dad’s.
He didn’t argue.
I can’t even remember leaving him there.
Nor can I clearly remember arriving back at my own house.
There are pieces of that journey that seem to have disappeared completely from my memory. I only remember the feeling of it: an enormous emptiness, as though something that had occupied so much space inside me had suddenly been ripped out.
That evening, I told my sons the whole nightmarish story.
I expected them to be horrified.
Instead, they reacted almost as though they had been expecting something like this all along.
They had never trusted Stephen.
They were angry on my behalf and far less charitable about him than I had ever been. To them, he was a low-life. Someone who didn’t know who he was. A parasite who attached himself to other people’s energy.
It was difficult to hear.
Partly because I understood where they were coming from.
But also because their version of Stephen didn’t contain the man I knew.
They hadn’t experienced all the other parts of him. The funny, curious, affectionate, enthusiastic man who could make ordinary things exciting. The man I could talk to for hours. The man who had become woven through almost every part of my life.
Both versions seemed to exist.
And I still didn’t know what to do with that.
But understanding Stephen did not mean that everything between us suddenly became calmer.
If anything, those first few days after Denmark were extraordinarily volatile.
The following day, Stephen suddenly became intensely worried about M.
My parents and other members of my family were still in Denmark, and M was due to be around some of them. Stephen wanted to know exactly what I had told them about what had happened.
He was frightened that somebody might confront her or say something that would destabilise her.
At first, I could understand the concern. M was vulnerable. Whatever responsibility she might or might not have had for what happened between them, I didn’t want her harmed either.
But then Stephen’s messages escalated.
He told me that if anyone said anything that caused M to have a meltdown, he would “set off a ‘bomb’ in that family they will never recover from.”
I was stunned.
Only days earlier, Stephen had left me alone in my aunt’s house to follow M through the streets of Denmark.
He had refused my pleas to come back.
He had stayed at her flat.
Our relationship had ended because of what had happened between them.
And now, while I was still trying to understand the wreckage of it all, he was threatening some kind of retaliation against my family in order to protect her.
Something in me snapped.
“You are not welcome at my house or my place of work,” I told him. That morning I had told him his job was still there for him if he wanted it.
I said I would return all his belongings the following weekend and block him at midnight.
“Your choices are horrendous. I don’t want it anymore in my life.”
When he told me he was panicking and didn’t want anyone else hurt, I answered:
“You’re damaging me and it stops now.”
Stephen quickly retreated from what he had said.
He told me he would never actually do anything. Becoming threatening, he said, had been a protective reaction. He had panicked.
But by then I had had enough.
“I’ve given everything I had to give,” I told him.
“The buck stops here.”
What strikes me now is how quickly I could move between compassion and absolute certainty.
I could believe Stephen was unwell.
I could believe he was overwhelmed.
I could desperately want to understand what was happening inside him.
And I could still reach a point where I thought: No. This is unacceptable.
That evening, I meant it.
I told him I couldn’t keep living inside ambiguity, never knowing which things he said were real and which things I was somehow expected to understand he hadn’t meant.
I told him that life was a sequence of choices and hoped his next one would be to get help.
Stephen acknowledged that something was seriously wrong. He described himself as going through a major relapse and, significantly, told me that it wasn’t mine to fix.
It sounded like an ending.
Except endings between Stephen and me were rarely clean.
By the following day, we were talking again.
Stephen told me he had been tempted to check whether M had replied to a goodbye message he had sent her, but instead he had gone outside for a cigarette.
I encouraged him not to reopen contact. M had family and friends around her. She had support. Whatever had happened between them, Stephen did not need to be the person who rescued her.
Then Stephen became overwhelmed.
He told me he wished he could hold me.
A little later he said he had finally broken down completely.
Sobbing.
Wailing.
For all my anger the previous evening, hearing his pain still affected me.
“I’m here,” I told him.
“I’ve got so much love for you.”
That contradiction is difficult to explain unless you understand what those days were actually like.
I wasn’t simply forgiving Stephen.
I wasn’t simply leaving him either.
I was moving between grief, anger, love, self-protection and a relentless need to understand what had happened.
By that evening, I told him something that probably captured my position better than anything else could have.
“I don’t want to lose you. By that I mean contact.”
The following morning I was still overwhelmed by sadness and disbelief. I admitted that I worried about how badly Stephen coped with being alone — whether loneliness or boredom would send him searching for connection again, perhaps even back towards M. According to Stephen, M had begged him to return to Denmark.
He told me he had been tempted to contact her, but hadn’t.
He was trying.
And perhaps that was what kept catching me.
Whenever I reached the point of believing I had to walk away completely, I would see some small indication that Stephen understood there was a problem and wanted to do something differently.
Later that morning, an idea occurred to me.
“Would you ever consider attending the the programme I did ?”
“I would consider anything that may help,” he replied.
Around twenty years earlier, I had attended the programme myself.
For me, it had been transformative.
It centred around ideas such as integrity, authenticity, forgiveness and personal responsibility. I had carried parts of what I learned there with me ever since.
Stephen became interested almost immediately.
He asked questions. He looked at the course. He investigated the cost and accommodation and wanted to understand how it worked.
“If it helps me to get better at Life…… price doesn’t matter!” he told me.
Then, having compared it with things he had previously learned in therapeutic community, he described it as potentially the perfect “top-up” for what he had learned and forgotten.
Something about that gave me hope.
Not because I suddenly believed Denmark was forgiven.
It wasn’t.
Not because we had decided to get back together.
We hadn’t.
And Stephen wouldn’t actually attend the programme until the end of September.
But for the first time since Denmark, there was something other than another conversation between the two of us.
Something he could do.
Something that didn’t depend upon me finding the right explanation, asking the right question or somehow teaching Stephen how to understand himself.
Perhaps someone else could help him see what I couldn’t make him see.
And perhaps, eventually, that might tell us whether there was anything left between us worth saving.
Reflection
Looking back, I think this was the point when understanding Stephen became almost inseparable from loving him. Denmark had given me every reason to walk away, and at moments I was absolutely certain that I would. I could recognise when his behaviour was unacceptable. I could draw boundaries, return his belongings and tell him that I had nothing left to give. But understanding why he behaved as he did still mattered enormously to me. If there was an explanation for what had happened, some part of me needed to find it.
That didn’t mean I was excusing him. In fact, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by explanations that seemed to make sense of Stephen’s emotional state without ever accounting for his choices. He could be overwhelmed, frightened, dysregulated or desperate to protect someone, and I could have compassion for all of those things. But I was beginning to understand that intention and consequence were different. Stephen didn’t have to intend to devastate me for me to be devastated. He didn’t have to mean a threat for me to experience it as threatening. His internal reasons could explain his behaviour without making the behaviour acceptable.
The difficulty was that compassion kept reopening doors that anger tried to close. I could tell Stephen, with complete conviction, that the buck stopped here and then hear him sobbing the following day and instinctively reach towards him. Neither response was false. I was furious with him, and I loved him. I wanted to protect myself, and I couldn’t bear the thought of abandoning someone I believed was struggling. I didn’t want the relationship we had just had, but I wasn’t ready for Stephen himself to disappear from my life.
Perhaps that was why the programme gave me so much hope. For years, talking had been the way Stephen and I tried to solve things. I listened, questioned, challenged, reassured and searched with him for explanations. After Denmark, I was beginning to reach the limits of what those conversations could achieve. Suggesting the programme was an attempt to place some of that responsibility somewhere other than with me. Maybe Stephen needed something I couldn’t provide. Maybe understanding himself had to become his work rather than ours.
I can see now how powerful that possibility was for me. As long as Stephen could recognise that something was wrong and seemed willing to seek help, it was difficult to believe that all hope was gone. I wasn’t yet offering him another chance at the relationship. I was offering him a chance to understand himself. But somewhere underneath that distinction was a question I wasn’t ready to let go of: if Stephen could finally understand why he kept making these choices, perhaps one day he might learn to make different ones.
