We are travelling across Lake Te Anau, a group of strangers united by a need to walk in the mountain air. The wind is whipping my hair into long streams; it feels like a river flowing back into the lake.

In the distance, I see the mountain range, and my heart lifts. It gently presses against a memory – the last time I was in a landscape like this was in the Himalayas, seven years ago.

Fiordland is a place that tumbles from one valley to another, waterfalls ribboning through the rock, deep, cold lakes gathered in extinguished craters, snowy peaks standing watch.

When I see the mountains layered against each other, solid yet so half-formed in the mist at their peaks, they look as if at any moment they may shift and move to reveal a gateway to a different world. I long for such a moment of escape.

How have seven years passed, when clambering over rocks and drinking hot tea in steel tumblers felt like yesterday?

Because I don’t know anyone else on the boat, I stick to the outside and peer my head around the corner of plastic sheeting.

The wind has picked up and little waves are scudding across the surface of the lake.

Our boat is powerful, creating bigger waves at the front as it pushes through, and in the light they look like curls of fire and ice, lit by the sun and quickly dissolving into the dark blue water. It is mesmerising.

I look at the heart of it. I feel the cold spray of lake water on my face. We are moving deeper and deeper into the centre of nowhere, remote and beautiful.

For the first time in nine months, I am peaceful, I think.

And then, and then, I can’t explain it, but in the midst of the air, water and light, I feel Rob, and I feel something say: I am here. And I am filled with him and I say: ‘I love you, honey, I miss you so much.’

And he says: I love you too, and I’m so sorry. The words just arrive inside me; I don’t know where they are coming from. I feel him standing behind me, looking over at the water, but I know what happened to Orpheus and so I’m not going to look back.

He’s here! I want this moment to be perfect, but instead I plead. I smell of desperation. ‘Why did you leave me?’

I feel the anger in my voice, the vastness of my own loneliness.

Why am I wasting this unbelievable moment on negativity? (Because it’s how you feel, you tell yourself later.)

And he answers: I wasn’t leaving you, I was leaving myself.