It got to the point where it hurt him too much to come home, to see the change in her. So he just stopped coming home as often. The truth was, he may have been wrong about there being room in his life for the lake and a wife. In the scope of things that he could understand, that he felt he could love unconditionally, the lake won every time. At the very least, if he wasn’t there, he couldn’t screw it up. If he wasn’t there, she still had to be.

For a while, it seemed Walter was right. Ten years went by without an incident. And then one day he came home from a two-week guiding trip and Kate disappeared for two days.

Walter was strangely calm as he went through the list of people they knew, calling them to ask if they had seen his wife, reassuring the girls that their mother was just off visiting a sick relative. It wasn’t just that he had been through this before. Waiting for Kate was now part of his muscle memory – something he could do on automatic pilot, without having to think about it too much. It was always best if he didn’t think about it too much.

He was calm, too, when she eventually came home. “We missed you,” was all he said.

Walter had hoped that Kate’s disappearance had been a momentary lapse in judgment. But deep down, he knew better. Over the next few months, her reckless behaviour started to escalate in alarming ways. Whenever Walter was home, she would disappear, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes overnight, once for an entire weekend. She never gave him any explanation, and feeling guilty about his own absences, he never felt he was in a position to ask. Once, he came back from a trip to discover that she had bought a motorcycle; another time she had bought a pet snake. That time, Walter had to put his foot down. There was no way he was going to live with a snake.

One evening, Kate was brought home by the police, who had found her standing in her bathing suit on the side of the James Street Swing Bridge with a rope tied around her feet. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I was trying to bungee jump,” she said later, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea.

“What the hell is that?” asked Walter, pacing through their kitchen, trying to keep his anger under control.

Kate shrugged. “You jump off of a bridge with your feet tied to it. I saw it on That’s Incredible! They filmed the first American woman bungee jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I thought maybe I could be the first Canadian woman.”