It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more Walter talked about having kids, the more distant Kate became, until one day he came home from work and she was gone. He felt her absence as soon as he walked in the door, and knew it was different this time, that she was not at the grocery store, or at her parents’. He sat in the kitchen at Victor Street until dawn, staring at the snow falling outside the window, not moving, barely able to breathe from the ache in his chest. At seven the next morning he saw headlights piercing the pre-dawn dark, fat flakes illuminated in the beams. Walter watched Kate get out of the car and walk towards the house, and then open the door to the kitchen. He reached out his hand to her and suddenly had a vision of her that day at Chippewa, climbing out of the ice and making her way towards him. For a split second he saw that same haunted look on her face, and it was as if she had crawled out of an abyss all over again.

Then in a flash the look was gone, and her face lit up with a smile. “I’m pregnant,” she told him, and Walter hugged her, and laughed, and hugged her again, all the hours spent staring out the window forgotten. But not that look. He never forgot that look.

The twins were born, and for almost a decade things were as close to normal as Walter could hope for. When Kate was around the girls she seemed content, but he could never fully shake the feeling that she was merely acting – playing the role of the good mother, the perfect wife, while pushing the real Kate further and further down. The real Kate: the one who drank brandy in haylofts, who proposed on doorsteps, who didn’t care what anyone else thought of her. But I love that Kate, Walter wanted to yell. Was it his fault? Had he led her to believe that this was what he wanted? Was this really what he wanted, after all?

Still, he could see glimpses of the real Kate when she was with Nicki and Finn – out in the yard climbing trees or catching bugs, coming home from tobogganing, running the wrong way up the escalator – until she saw Walter and fixed the mask back on her face. “Welcome home, darling,” she would say, kissing his cheek, then retreat to the kitchen to get supper started, her body closed off like a treacherous road.