Maybe Cathy was right, he’d thought, for not long after, he came home from work to find a pair of baby shoes fastened to the front door. When he opened it, Cathy flew into his arms with the news.

She was pregnant.

-Chapter 18-

Southern Alberta

The news of Cathy’s pregnancy was wonderful.

They were overjoyed.

Fortin found himself smiling again. For the first time, he’d slipped out of the yoke of his guilt to consider being a dad. Cathy glowed with the promise of a baby in their future.

They’d need a bigger house. He’d made discreet enquiries on the status of his bid to make corporal and through his sources, he was told it looked good, but nothing could be confirmed yet. In his case, it was still going to take a while longer before his results were known.

Deep in his gut, Fortin feared that somewhere up the chain, someone had an issue with his application.

Something’s going on. It never takes this long.

But he tried hard not to let his concerns about it get in the way as he and Cathy prepared for the baby. He’d cut down on his drinking and was sleeping better.

Working on the assumption Fortin would make Corporal and be assigned to the Calgary sub-division, he and Cathy would drive there whenever they had the chance. They’d check out neighborhoods, housing prices, and calculate affordability over lunch or dinner.

Cathy was already talking to friends about the possibility of a teaching job in Calgary, or the surrounding area, like Okotoks, Airdrie, or Cochrane.

Everything was going well, until the weekend they were in Lake Bonavista, a sleepy community in Calgary’s southeast. Cathy was still in her first trimester and they’d been looking at houses in some of the city’s lake communities. They’d finished for the day in Bonavista and had gone to a restaurant there for dinner, a beautiful glass-walled place that overlooked the lake. They were halfway through their salads when Cathy excused herself to go to the restroom.

After fifteen solid minutes had passed with no sign of her, Fortin grew concerned. His anxiety had deepened when a server, worry written on her face, approached his table.

“Mr. Fortin?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, your wife’s in distress. We’ve called an ambulance.”

He’d hurried into the restroom to see Cathy sitting on a bench, gripping her lower stomach, horror in her eyes. Two women held towels to her pelvis; one had said she was a nurse as Cathy cried to him.

“I can’t stop bleeding, Will!”

From that moment, everything had blurred in a whirlwind of flashing lights and emergency radios as paramedics placed Cathy on a stretcher.