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I rest my face against his back and watch the rice fields go past and feel something I have been feeling in various forms for two weeks and which I have decided to stop arguing with and simply let be what it is.

Amsterdam arrives the way Amsterdam always arrives — the flat coast, the polders, the Schiphol approach I now know from the passenger window rather than the cockpit side. The wheels on the runway. The long taxi to the terminal.

I sit in my seat as the aircraft taxis to the terminal.

I have always had, in previous years, a particular feeling at this point. The end of August, the approach into Schiphol, the weight of two weeks of good weather and no meetings giving way to the city and the routine and the ordinary life resuming. A kind of low-grade loss. Not dramatic. Just the gravity of returning.

I don't have it this year.

I notice its absence of the post-holiday sadness, the familiar small grief, and find it simply isn't there. I turn this over. I look at the seat beside me, the centre console, the hand that is currently resting over mine.

Patrick is in seat D. He has been in seat D for the last fourteen hours. He has slept for four of them, which I know because I watched him, and spent the rest watching something on his screen and drinking tea and occasionally reaching across the centre console to hold my hand, which I have let him do every time.

He is going home with me.

This is the fact I keep returning to. Not the end of Bali — the waterfalls, the rice terraces, the beach club, the aircraft debate, all of it going into the past at nine hundred kilometres per hour. Not the resumption of the ordinary. Just: he is going home with me. He will be there when I make coffee tomorrow morning. His jacket will be on the hook. His tea will be in the third drawer.

Wherever Patrick is, I have come to understand, is where I want to be.

Which means Amsterdam is fine. Amsterdam is, in fact, excellent.

The aircraft stops at the gate. People around us begin collecting their things with the usual post-long-haul urgency. Patrick unbuckles and stretches, and looks at me.

"Home," he says.

I look at him.

"Yes," I say. "Home."

He takes my hand and we walk off the aircraft together into the Schiphol morning, and I find I have nothing at all to miss.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PATRICK

Jan goes to Madrid on a Monday. I know this because I have his calendar on my phone — this is a thing we established quietly, some weeks ago, without formal agreement. He shared it; I added mine. I look at it the way I look at my roster, which is: regularly, and with the intention of finding the gaps where we might align. Jan has quarterly reviews in Madrid, London, and Frankfurt. I have Singapore, Cape Town, New York, Atlanta. There is more overlap than you'd think, if you look carefully enough, and I look carefully enough.

I have managed, in the last two months, to arrange two layovers that coincide with Jan's return dates. He has, I suspect, arranged at least one meeting schedule to accommodate my roster without telling me. Neither of us has mentioned this directly. It is, I find, one of my favourite things about us.

The Madrid trip is three nights — Monday through Wednesday, home Thursday morning. I know this the way I know his preferences and his patterns: precisely, and with attention.

He packs on Sunday evening. I sit on the bed and hand him things when asked. He kisses me before he goes to the taxi on Monday morning and I stand in the hallway after the door closes and feel the absence of Jan — the apartment quieter, his side of things missing.

I am not good at this part. Not that I show it. But the apartment is quieter than it should be and his side of the bed is the wrong temperature and I find myself picking up my phone to tell him something and putting it down.

I think, standing in the kitchen making tea I don't particularly want, about the social life that has quietly contracted over the last year. The friends who went with Maya. The evenings I stopped accepting invitations to. The Amsterdam solitude that I used to inhabit without noticing and now notice.

What I want, I am precise about this, standing in the kitchen… is not to rebuild the old social life. That version of things is gone and I don't miss most of it. What I want is to build something new. The kind of thing you build when you are with someone — people who know us as we are now rather than as I was before, evenings that include Jan, a social world that belongs to both of us. Something that didn't exist before Cancun and that I want to build properly.

I make a note to talk to Jan about this when he's back.

I text him instead. He replies with the precision and brevity of someone in back-to-back meetings who has made thirty seconds available. It is enough. It is Jan.

The simulator runs Monday through Wednesday, three days of recency training, the annual check that keeps my licence current. Procedures, emergencies, the full range. I have done this every year since I qualified and it is the same every time: the focused calm of the aircraft, the part of myself that is simply good at this and has always known it.

On Wednesday evening I walk out feeling the good tiredness of something done well. Jan back tomorrow.

I go home.