“Yes,” says Walter. He decides not to tell Dallas that Kate is awake. At this moment, he doesn’t trust anyone – especially a stranger, which is essentially what Dallas is.

“I knew it was her, you know.” Dallas drums his fingers against the railing. Walter suspects he might be stoned. His eyes keep darting away, flitting from face to face as people pass by them on the bridge, then back down to the water. “Before I even saw the video. I heard on the radio that a woman had gone over the falls and I thought, That’s gotta be Kate.”

Walter feels his pulse pick up again. “Why did you think that?”

“Well, I mean, she was always talking about those Niagara daredevils, right? You know, Annie Taylor, Bobby Leach, Karel Soucek. How cool it would be if someone tried it at Kakabeka. When I heard that on the radio I was like, Oh man, she actually did it.” Dallas reaches in his pocket and pulls out a Kleenex, which he starts systematically shredding. “But I’m not telling you anything new. You must have known it was going to happen.”

Walter thinks about that day, a week ago, when Kate said, “Let’s go to Kakabeka.” He had thought she was being nostalgic for those afternoons they spent as a family wandering along the cliffs, climbing down the Little Falls trail, stopping on the way home at the Big Scoop for ice cream. Now he realizes it was a reconnaissance mission. How was he to know?

He knows Kate, that’s how. He knows her far better than this sorry excuse for a man standing next to him on the bridge. “People talk about stuff like that all the time,” he says, trying to control the shaking in his voice. “It doesn’t mean they’re going to do it.”

“Come on, man. This is Kate we’re talking about. You know how she always used to say that thing, the quote from the side of Soucek’s barrel or whatever? ‘It’s not whether you fail or triumph, it’s that you try,’ or something like that? The reporter said she’d look it up.”

It takes all of Walter’s willpower not to push Dallas over the edge of the bridge. “You talked to a reporter?”

“Oh, yeah. Cassandra something? She said she was tracking down members of the Parker family.”

“You are not a Parker,” Walter says quietly.

“No, I know, man, I just…well.” He lets the shredded Kleenex go, and it drifts down to the river. “I didn’t really have much to tell her anyway. I just gave her that picture I had. I figured Kate would have wanted them to use a nice one for her big moment of fame, you know?”

Walter watches the river carry the Kleenex to the brink, and then it is gone. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.