I am now Mrs Sam Hunt. I am also Mrs Sam Hunt who is going to have your grandchild. We don’t live in your house. I just get the mail from there. We live at 281 Lynx Trail, room 5. I miss you both terribly. Will you come and see us? You’ll love my husband. I do. All my love, Peach.

P.S. I’m so happy.

She mailed it off and in their joy forgot all about it.

Two days letter they got a telegram.

Katie. On Air Canada flight 127. 2.45 p.m. tomorrow. Congratulations my darling. Us-Two.

The telegram, like an omen of good will, had been addressed to Mr and Mrs Sam Hunt. Katie was thrilled. Sam was nervous.

‘Have you told them anything about me?’ he asked her that night in bed, lying like spoons.

‘Of course I have. Lots.’ She snuggled in, muttered, ‘You’ll love them,’ and fell asleep.

Sam had lain awake, thinking. A darkened door creaked open in his head that let a sliver of memory about his own parents escape. He slammed it shut again. Any whiff of his past was like noxious gas. He thanked God the woman in his arms would never peek through into that terrifying world. Never encounter those two walking nightmares that had called themselves his mother and father. More importantly, he would never have to protect whoever was inside Katie’s womb from the kind of mind-numbing horror they had inflicted on him as a daily ritual.

That was in the past. Another life. A different Sam.

With Katie he could live again. He wished shamefully at that moment he could change his skin. Do a Michael Jackson in time for their flight to touch down. If Katie could have read his thoughts she would have chastised him for that. But she couldn’t read them. She was softly and safely asleep in his arms, her hot sweet body primed with life. He stayed awake until dawn, waiting for the light to spill through the thin ragged curtains, feeling her stir, listening to her breathe.

Sam took an honest half-day off work and Katie phoned in with a dishonest sick headache and they took a bus into Calgary Airport to meet his new family.

Those sliding doors. Those unthinking, impassive sliding doors behind the metal barrier. They opened every few seconds, spewing out busy people, tired people, but mostly happy people who were met and embraced. A human lottery. Who would come through next, and who would claim them? The doors didn’t give a donkey’s hole. They just kept right on pumping them out; but they seemed to glide open in slow motion for Sam as the two elegant, elderly people spotted their daughter and waved like children on a ride.