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Patrick has never promised me the future. No one can. And I have spent my entire adult life learning that today's certainty and tomorrow's certainty are not the same thing.

This is not Patrick's failure. Patrick has spent three months showing me, in every way available to him, that he is here and choosing this and not going anywhere. I know this. I can list the evidence. I have listed it approximately forty times in the last three days.

The problem is not Patrick.

The problem is that no proof is ever enough when the thing you're afraid of is loss itself. When the fear is not he will leave but everything leaves eventually and I have built my life around never being destroyed by that fact and I don't know how to do this without dismantling the architecture.

Patrick does not know this is happening. I have been having this conversation alone.

I put my phone down.

I go back to work.

Patrick flies to New York on Tuesday morning.

It is a quick rotation — out Tuesday, one night on the ground, departing New York Wednesday evening and landing in Amsterdam Thursday morning. He has done this route dozens of times. I have his roster on my phone because he sends it to me and I look at it the same way I look at everything: once, clearly, filing it. One night. Back Thursday.

I did not anticipate what one night would do.

Tuesday is fine. I work. I go to the gym. I eat dinner alone at the kitchen table and read and go to sleep at a reasonable hour and notice his absence as a fact rather than a feeling, which is the correct response.

Wednesday is less fine.

I wake up at five and lie in the dark and the comment is there, the one Tomas sent, the one I have been filing under irrelevant for days, and in the undefended hour of five in the morning it does not stay filed. Patrick's going to figure out he's bi and go back to a woman who can actually give him a normal life.

I get up. I make coffee. I stand at the window and look at the canal and have an argument with myself that I win on points but not convincingly.

Wednesday is the weekly lunch with Tomas.

I consider cancelling. I don't, because cancelling would require an explanation and I don't have one that doesn't involve saying things I am not ready to say. I go. We sit at our usual table at the café near the Jordaan and order our usual things and talk about ordinary things until Tomas looks at me.

"What's wrong?" he says. He has put his cup down and folded his hands on the table, the full Tomas attention, the one he reserves for things that actually matter.

"Nothing." I look at the table.

"Jan." His voice doesn't change. He doesn't press. He just says my name the way he has for sixteen years, which is enough.

"I'm fine."

He looks at me for a long moment with the expression he has been developing for sixteen years — patient, undeceived, waiting. "Patrick's in New York," he says.

"Yes."

"And you're fine."

"Yes."

He looks at me for another moment. Then he picks his cup back up.

"I don't believe you," he says. Pleasantly. The way he says things that are true and has decided not to argue about.

"Tomas."

"I'm not going to push." He drinks his coffee. "I just want you to know I don't believe you. And that whenever you decide you want to talk about whatever this actually is, I'm here." He sets the cup down. "As I have always been."

I look at him.

"That's all," he says. "We can go back to the film now."