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He does not come to the first class. I stand at the front of the room and make a slow careful X beside his name, unsure if what I feel is blessed relief or crushing disappointment.

He comes instead to my house, just as night is falling. I begin to babble. “Come in, Tshewang, it’s good to see you, sit down over there, move that stuff aside, yeah, just push it over—would you like some, some coffee? Tea? Lemon squash? I have some books for you, did I tell you that already? Just let me find them here in this mess ...”

“Miss,” he says in a small, tight voice, “I can’t go on like this.”

I cannot go on like this, either. I will have to go back to Canada. There is no other option. “Tshewang, this is all my fault. I should have—”

“Miss,” he says loudly, and I wince. “Listen. Just listen.” His gaze is frozen on the cuff of his gho. “I love you.”

I want to weep.

“Well?” he says in a voice as hushed as dust. “Have I ruined everything now?”

“No. No.” I sit down beside him and hold his hand. We are both trembling. I tell him that I’ve been in love with him since I don’t know when, that I tried my best not to be, but I am. He nods, squeezes my hand tightly.

“But there’s nowhere for us to go. We can’t see each other, we can’t be together. We’re just—just stuck here. We can’t have a relationship.”

“We already have a relationship.”

“But it can’t go beyond this. I mean, we can’t sleep together.”

“Oh,” he says. “No. I knew that.” He goes to the window and pulls the curtain edge over the bit of night showing through. “But, miss?”

“Yes?”

“It’s up to you. I told you that before. And I’ll accept whatever you say. But the truth is, I don’t see why not.” He smiles wickedly. “Aside from all the obvious reasons.”

“The obvious reasons are pretty big reasons, Tshewang.”

“Well, yes,” he says slowly. “But love is a big reason.”

“Don’t you care that I’m your English teacher? And a foreigner? Don’t you care what might happen? Don’t say you don’t care—it makes me crazy. It’s just not true.”

“Well, of course it’s not true,” he says, exasperated. “Of course I care. I wish you were the shopkeeper’s daughter down the road, but you’re not. So what to do.”

I could say we should do nothing. It is too risky, too difficult, I could say it is all wrong, and it would never work out, and we would regret it in the end, so let’s turn back now. But I am tired of pretending to myself and fighting with myself. Underneath all my efforts at detachment was this singular, driving, persistent attachment. I want Tshewang far more than I ever wanted to give him up.

I pretended that I was resisting out of the ethical considerations but the truth is I resist because I am afraid. My time in Bhutan, my whole journey in fact, from the day I first read the name in the newspaper until this very moment, has been a coming to these edges, these verges, high places where I am buffeted by winds and dazed by the view, by the risks and the possibilities I never imagined could exist in my life, where I am astonished that I could get so high up, how on earth did I get so high up, where a voice whispers JUMP and another cries DON’T. Where I could turn back and walk down to safer ground, or I could throw myself over that edge, into what, what is out there, what is it that I am so afraid of beyond this last safe step where I am now standing? It is only my own life, I realize, that I am afraid of, and at each high point I am given the chance to throw myself over and back into it.

I am sobbing with the realization, and Tshewang is panicked, telling me shh, shhh, he is sorry, he will go, and I tell him to stay, it is not that at all. He puts his arms around me and I cry into his gho until the tears stain a dark lake in the wool, until I am exhausted and lighter than air, and then I take his hand and lead him out of the sitting room into the hallway where we stop to kiss, and I feel a million tiny windows flying open in my skin. We look into the bedroom. “Not here,” Tshewang whispers, and pulls the mattress and quilt off the bed and into the dining room, where the