He saw her stop and then turn. The knot of worry tightened. She was scanning the horizon, trying to see where the sound was coming from. Then her direction changed. She’s coming back down, he thought. She’s actually listening. But she was descending too quickly. She wasn’t coming down, she was falling. She had turned towards the sound of his voice and she had let go and now her body was disappearing between the rocks. No, thought Walter. Get up, get up, get up. You can do it, Katie, get up. He stared at the spot on the rugged coastline where she had fallen, willing her head to appear over the rock. Come on, Katie, come on. Next to him, he could feel Harry and Briggs both holding their breaths. Once again, he had blinked and Kate was gone. Forty years had passed and nothing had changed. He was still Waiting Walter, standing there watching Kate slip away from him.

When they found her, floating in the water at the base of the cliff, she had a severely broken leg and a possible concussion from hitting the rocks below. The Coast Guard base in Houghton wanted her brought back there, but Briggs, suddenly tenderhearted in the face of Walter’s misery, persuaded them to airlift her back to Thunder Bay instead. Walter rode back in the boat with Harry – he couldn’t just abandon him, after everything he had done. When he got back to Victor Street, the kids were awake and watching television. He asked the neighbour to stay a little longer, and then he called Shawn and Finn.

“I don’t know where your sister is,” he told Finn on the phone. “But your mother’s in the hospital, and I’ve got the girls here.”

“The hospital?” Finn sounded as though she had just woken up even though it was almost eleven in the morning. I should make her come out on the coffee cruise tomorrow, Walter thought. “What happened?”

“She fell off the roof,” he said before he could think it through.

“I think Dallas is out with the car, but I’ll come as soon as I can,” Finn said, although Walter had a feeling it wouldn’t be soon at all. “And I’ll try Nicki’s cell.”

He got to the hospital before anyone else and found her lying on a bed behind a curtain in the emergency room. They didn’t even have a proper room for her. Her leg was in traction, her arms were covered in scrapes, and she had an angry red welt on her forehead that was growing into a goose egg. He sat down on the one chair next to the bed. He tried to meet her eyes, but they darted around the makeshift room, resting on a crack in the curtain.

“I told the kids you fell off the roof,” he said.

“Why?”