His head was swimming and he felt nauseous. The smoke was still rising in a black column, its source hidden by the Hunts’ snowy roof. Sam could almost make out a form in the smoke. It was not a form he wished to look at for hours, the way he might look for shapes in the smoke of a log-fire, but it was the last thing he saw before he passed out.

Sam realized he was looking at the bedroom ceiling. Two familiar lozenge-shaped pieces of plaster that had been threatening to fall since the pipe burst last winter comfortingly filled his vision. He sometimes looked at those two shapes when Katie was on top of him, not irritated by the reminder of repairs to be done but soothed by the part they played in being bits of his house. The house they owned, well at least Katie owned. The house where he ate his dinner, watched TV, made love to his wife and brought up his kids. The house he had tried to make his own for ten years, lovingly patching its tiles, painting its flaky wood and scooping leaves from its gutters. Yes, his house. Their house.

‘Are you awake, honey? I think he’s awake, doctor. Sam, are you all right?’

Katie was bending over him now, obscuring the plaster shapes with her pale face. Sam smiled dreamily, remembering the photos they had taken in a booth in Calgary Airport, waiting for Katie’s parents to arrive from Vancouver. The booth’s exposure had been set for Katie’s fair white skin, and Sam’s dark Indian face had come out as a featureless brown blob. Katie had laughed hard at the four useless snaps of herself kissing what looked like an old brown football propped on the shoulders of a suede jacket. Sam had laughed too, but had stopped laughing when he saw the look on Katie’s parents’ faces as they realized that the Indian guy standing next to their daughter was not the cab driver waiting to relieve them of their luggage, but the man she had told them so much about. The man she had thrown it all away for. The man she had married.

‘Can you hear me, Mr Hunt?’

Alan Harris was leaning into Sam’s vision, bringing with him a faint smell of linoleum.

‘Sure. I hear you. I hit the deck, right?’

‘Right. How does the head feel?’ The doctor put his stethoscope to his ears and pulled back the goosedown comforter to put the cold metal to Sam’s chest.

‘Okay, I guess. How long have I been out?’