I drove to every place in Sydney I’d ever been to with Patrick.

I drove back and forth across the Harbour Bridge at least thirty times.

I was so in love with this city when I first came here. Sydney. Even just the name sounded exciting to me, like “New York” probably sounds to more sophisticated people who didn’t grow up in a tiny gray smidge of a country town right in the middle of Tasmania.

“You’re from Tasmania?” Sydneysiders used to say, with a lifted eyebrow and a half smile, when what they actually wanted to say was, “Really? That dear little place?” And I would duck my head humbly, as if I was saying, “Don’t hold it against me.” That doesn’t happen anymore. Now people murmur, “Oh, beautiful countryside in Tasmania.” I don’t know if it’s me who has changed or Tasmania.

Sydney is my big, brash, jewelry-wearing, credit-card-flashing ex-lover. Sydney dazzled me with beaches and bars and sunshine, with restaurants and cafés and music and with that big, hard, glittery sapphire of a harbor.

Like a silly, besotted girlfriend, I threw myself into finding out everything there was to know about this place. I know my way around Sydney better than any local or taxi driver. I can tell you where to go for the best yum cha and sushi and tapas. I know the theaters and the museums and the cool pubs. I know where to scuba dive, where to bushwalk, where to park. I’d only been living in Sydney for six months when I met Patrick, who has never lived anywhere else, and he didn’t know half the places I took him to even existed.

Patrick and Sydney gave me the best, the most blissful time of my life. We kissed on ferries and drank champagne by the harbor. We saw plays and movies and bands. We took Jack, grinning down at me from Patrick’s backpack, on long walks through the green dappled light of the national parks. We held his hands on the beach and said, “One, two, three!” and scooped him up high over waves that frothed around our ankles.

I was so in love with both of them. I remember saying to my mother, “I didn’t know it could be so easy to be this happy.”

And she’d say, “Hearing you say that just makes my day.” I could imagine how she’d be smiling as she scrubbed energetically away at her kitchen with a dishcloth and a bottle of Spray n’ Wipe.

Because all Mum ever wanted was for me to be happy.

I always thought she was just weirdly selfless, until I started taking care of Jack, and that’s when I began to get an inkling of how your child’s moods dictate yours and how maybe that becomes a habit.

I do remember that once she said, “Do you think Patrick is as happy as you?” and I said that of course he was just as happy as me.

There was a pause, and then she said, very carefully, tentatively, “It’s been less than a year since he lost his wife. He must still be grieving, Saskia, it takes such a long time, just maybe … keep that in mind.”

She was qualified to talk on the subject because my dad died when I was a toddler. I don’t remember a thing about him. I certainly do not have any repressed feelings of abandonment by my daddy.

I know my father was the love of my mother’s life, according to her, and I know she said she missed him every day, but that doesn’t mean Patrick was the same. For one thing, Mum didn’t meet anyone else who could have made her happy. Patrick met me. I made him happy. I know I made him happy. I’m not stupid. I didn’t imagine it.

Of course, I knew part of him was still grieving for Colleen. I was deeply respectful of Colleen’s wishes about Jack’s upbringing. She had written down a list of instructions. Her writing was shaky because she must have been quite ill by then. Her spelling wasn’t the best. It was uncharitable of me to notice that, I know, but there you have it; I have never held myself out to be a particularly nice person. Colleen believed in vitamins, so I gave Jack his vitamin tablets every day. Colleen believed that singlets somehow protected children from all evil, so I put singlets on him even when I knew he was probably going to be too hot. I’m sure Colleen didn’t mean for the poor child to wear a singlet on warm days, but Patrick took everything on that list literally.

And Patrick was happy with me. He said he was happy. He said, “You saved my life.” He said, “I’m keeping you forever.” He said, “I would have been lost without you.”

Today I lay on the beach and dreamed of Colleen. In my dream I was screaming at her, “There is no need for an apostrophe in the word ‘vitamins’!”

So that’s a pretty embarrassing, nerdy dream: screaming at a dead person about her grammar.

Somebody said, “Big night?”

And I opened my eyes and there was a man standing on the sand staring down at me. I was looking straight into the sun, so I couldn’t see much of him except that he was wearing a knee-length wet suit and carrying a boogie board under one arm and had woolly hair that seemed too young for him.

I sat up and looked down at my red dress. I guess I did look like someone who had passed out after a big party, except I’m too old for that kind of behavior. I said, “Sort of.”

Then he didn’t seem to know what else to say. He smiled and put his fingers to his forehead in a sort of salute and kept walking down to the water. I sat on the beach and watched him on his boogie board. He wasn’t very good at it. He kept trying to paddle for waves and then missing them, but each time he finally managed to catch one, he got such a funny excited look on his face, his woolly hair lying flat against his forehead.