It wasn’t as though he didn’t deserve what he had. Sam thought he more than deserved it. Nothing had come easy to Sam Hunt.

Even this house that wasn’t really his. Sometimes, when he caught sight of some corner he hadn’t yet made his own, some little physical reminder of holidays another young family used to share in this house, the memory of meeting its owners nearly a decade ago was still ripe.

He’d known by Katie’s face, that night ten years ago when he came home from work into the tiny plasterboard-lined room in the staff quarters, what she was going to tell him. She was shining. Joy was dripping from her like syrup. He’d put down his battered tin lunch-box on the bed and held her before she even spoke.

‘Sam.’

Her voice was muffled, her face pressed against his chest.

‘Katie.’

‘I’m going to have a baby.’

Then they’d kissed and laughed and kissed again. They’d lain on that sagging old bed and carefully done again what made it happen in the first place. Afterwards, Katie said it was time to tell her parents everything. Sam knew she’d been in touch with them plenty and was glad. The boy in him would have fought anyone, friends, foe or family, to the death to keep her. But the man wanted her to have all the old securities she enjoyed in her Vancouver life. His love was passionate and deeper, he thought, than even Katie realized, but unlike Tom’s, it wasn’t suffocating. He was pleased that she wrote her parents weekly. She wrote and told them everything she could, on postcards of bears and porcupines she swiped from the free guest carousel in the hotel. Told them she loved someone called Sam Hunt, told them how good he was for her, but no more. Told them she was working, assured them the hotel shop job was temporary, and most importantly told them she was fine, loved them madly and missed them. She replied to the mail that she picked up weekly from the empty house on the hill where they thought she was living and never revealed otherwise.

Time, she thought, to put things straight. She hadn’t been deceiving them deliberately. Katie had just been caught in that happy time-warp lovers find themselves in, where nothing matters except that other precious person. Now, though, they were going to be a serious family.

She sat down that night and wrote them a note. Sam read it over her shoulder, nuzzling her ear, his hands on her belly that was still flat and hard.

Darling You-Two,