‘That’s what you said. I was so proud of you. I thought you were so compassionate and understanding and big-hearted. Now you’re standing here like you got a white pointy sheet on your head. What’s gone wrong, Dad?’

‘I guess I was being romantic, Katie. You were too young to see what was going on out of the arena. The drunks. The fights.’

‘Yeah. None of us have ever seen white Canadians get loaded and act like assholes at a rodeo. Right?’

‘We love you, Katie.’

‘Then love him too. He’s the father of your grandchild.’

Another pause.

‘If you hurt Sam, you hurt me.’

There was the sound of a chair scraping across the floor, and Sam imagined someone was taking a seat. The kitchen door opened and Katie’s father walked out, stopping abruptly as he viewed Sam, surprised to see him standing at the window. His eyes told the tale that he realized and regretted that Sam had heard everything.

That irked Sam. Where did they think he’d been? On arrival, they’d just abandoned him and retreated to the kitchen, leaving him like a tradesman to stand in the parlour. Did they imagine he’d gone to squat outside in the dirt, wrapped in a blanket to dry buffalo meat over a fire?

Frank Crosby crossed the room to his new son-in-law and stopped in front of him. Oh God, thought Sam. Here it comes.

Katie’s father held out a liver-spotted hand to him. ‘Sam. Will you accept my apologies for a rather unpleasantly cool reception into the family?’

The kitchen door was open. Katie was standing in the frame looking at the back of her father’s head with blazing eyes.

Sam looked down at the hand on offer, and back up at Frank Crosby’s face. I should lay him out, he thought. I should spit on his hand and walk out of this house a man.

The whole action was a charade. A scene out of a bad soap opera that Frank Crosby obviously thought he had the leading role in. What a fool he was, if he thought he could wipe out all that prejudice and ignorance with a handshake like a plantation owner to the freed slave.

But he could see bits of Katie there. The fold of skin at the corner of the eyes that stopped them short of being almond, the pointed chin, albeit surrounded by a few more folds of flesh in this face, the small-lobed ears.

He knew then that his love of his wife and unborn child was greater than any hurt that this confused, guilty and bigoted white man, or any man, could inflict. He loved Katie, and for her he would build a bridge over these white people’s ignorance so that his child could run between them all.

His hand touched Frank’s and they closed their fingers together.