Walter knows that if someone were to look back at the story of his life with Kate, it would seem as though the climax came early, and everything else was a long, drawn-out denouement. After the morning Kate showed up at his apartment, the next forty years seemed uneventful. Not to say that there weren’t adventures, that there weren’t hardships – the business, the twins, Shawn, the grandkids, illnesses, loss – but none of that had been exclusively the story of them, the narrative of their relationship. Kate’s early-morning proposal was their kiss on top of the Empire State Building, it was their “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.”

He had almost convinced himself that it didn’t matter if he ever saw her again. He had just graduated from Lakehead with a bachelor of science degree, but what really interested him was the new field of ecology, specifically studying contamination from pulp and paper effluent in Lake Superior and how it affected wildlife populations.

“I hope you haven’t found someone else,” Kate had said that morning at his door. But Walter had – not someone, but something. The lake. It was a gradual thing: a walk along the shoreline, a quick paddle, his feet buried in the black sand at Mission Island, or working his way over the rocks at Tee Harbour, transfixed by the shape of the shoreline, the clatter of stones being pulled back and pushed in by the pulse of the waves. The constant pressing ache in his chest whenever he was near – and then, whenever he was far, which prompted his move from his parents’ farm in the Slate River Valley to Port Arthur, to a nondescript apartment building on the hill with drafty windows, too-small closets, and stained carpets, just so in in the morning he could gaze out those drafty windows and see the lake, covered with ice in winter and teeming with ships in summer, and the Sleeping Giant, still only a pile of rocks on the horizon.

The lake had tried to take Kate. In Walter’s mind, it had wanted her as much as he had – he could hardly blame it for that. And the more time he spent with the lake, the more protective he felt. He was certain that he was meant to make serving Lake Superior his life’s goal. To thank it for giving Kate back. But there had to be room in his life for a lake and a wife, surely.