Free The Snow Falcon by Stuart Harrison Page A

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    him to receive it after the event. Louise herself came from a happy family, with two brothers and parents who welcomed Michael as one of their own. He’d never talked about his own family except to say that he was an only child, that his mother had died when he was eighteen and he didn’t get on with his dad. He’d never tried to explain why, or revealed that his mother had taken an overdose. Louise had tried to persuade him to invite his dad to the wedding, a conversation that had developed into a serious argument.
    “You don’t understand about him, okay! Just forget it,” he’d said, aware that his voice was rising uncontrollably but unable to stop it.
    After that, she’d let it drop. A couple of weeks after he’d written, a wedding present had arrived from his dad, and a card. He’d put the present, unopened, in the spare room, but Louise had found it, and one day when he came home from work, a hand-blown glass vase was standing on the table.
    “Call him. Just do that, please,” Louise had said. “What harm can it do?”
    He’d refused, and she’d let it go. But it was there between them, a taboo subject he wouldn’t discuss, and it festered.
    The first years of their marriage had been happy. Louise had honey-blond hair and serious gray eyes, but when she smiled, they melted. He’d loved her then as completely as any man could. Her body was slim and firm and she knew how to dress so that she turned men’s heads in the street. He’d been proud of her. He’d thought he was lucky to have her, and looking back now, he could see that that was the first sign something was slightly wrong. It was as if he’d already felt that nobody should expect things to go so well, that it couldn’t last. He had a beautiful wife, a career going places, and at the back of his mind there was a shadow lurking, a gloomy tendency to wonder when it would all go wrong.
    His dad called once or twice from Little River, and they’d had stilted conversations. After a while the calls had stopped coming, but there’d been letters instead. Every time he’d read one, he’d felt the need to be alone for a while, and sometimes he’d read them over and over again. Perhaps he was searching between the lines for a message that wasn’t there. His dad wrote about the town and small things that were happening. He never mentioned Michael’s mother or asked him to come back and visit. Louise had periodically tried to persuade him that he should try to work out whatever had gone wrong be-
     
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    tween them, or at least talk about it, but he could never bring himself to do that. If he and Louise ever argued, it was over this one thing, this part of his life he excluded her from.
    When Holly was born, Louise had given up her job. About that time, Michael had been headhunted to a new agency where he was paid more money. It should have been a perfect time, but the shadow in his mind had grown longer and darkened his thoughts. From a vague feeling that he was undeserving of his existence, he became convinced that disaster was just around the corner, that all of his good fortune had been devised to lull him into a false sense of security. He looked for the warning signs. The birth of his daughter had made him wonder how it was possible to have so much love for a person. He’d look at her, so helpless and vulnerable, and the emotions he’d felt constricted his throat. He kept thinking that he was responsible for her life, that everything she experienced when she was young would shape her and stay with her for all of her days, and he’d promised he would make her life perfect the way his own had never been. He would lie awake at night, and when Louise would question him, he’d tell her that he was afraid for Holly, afraid that it would all come apart. She’d tried to comfort him, but he could see in her eyes that she was worried.
    “But why should anything go wrong?” she’d said. “Everything’s