Free The Snow Falcon by Stuart Harrison Page B

fine.”
    “It’s just the way I feel.”
    He’d started calling home at odd hours, checking that everything was okay, sometimes turning up unexpectedly at the apartment. At first Louise had been touched by his concern, then one day it had got to her. Maybe Holly had given her a bad time because she was teething, and maybe the strain was just beginning to show. She’d flown at him when he’d come in the door early in the afternoon.
    “Michael, what are you doing here? Why are you doing this? You keep sneaking around as if you expect to find something!”
    “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
    “We’re fine. Michael, we’re fine.” She’d spoken slowly, trying to maintain control. “You have to stop doing this. You’re smothering me,” she’d said in a softening voice.
    He had stopped—for a few days, anyway—but then started again, and it got to the point where she persuaded him that his insecurities
     
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    stemmed from his own upbringing and that he ought to see a therapist or else get in touch with his dad.
    “I could maybe understand if you’d at least tell me something about your parents. What is it that made you this way?”
    By then, though, it was way too late. The mention of the subject was like opening a sore every time they spoke, and they argued. At the time, he’d been surprised by her insight, but when he thought about it later, he saw how obvious it must have been. As time went on, she talked more about his seeing somebody. His moods had started to affect her, too, she claimed. There were days when they hardly spoke, and he began to suspect her of having an affair.
    When Holly was about a year old, Michael got a call one day from the RCMP in Little River. His dad’s car had been traveling on the wrong side of the road when he came around a bend outside of town, and he’d hit a logging truck head on. The impact had flattened his Dodge, killing him instantly. The cop that called Michael said that his father wouldn’t have known anything about it. Maybe a moment’s awareness and then oblivion. Michael was numbed by the news, and then the knowledge filtered through that they would never be reconciled, that all the things he’d kept locked up now had nowhere to go.
    Louise had all but begged him to go to the funeral. She’d said they would all go, that he could show her and Holly where he’d grown up. The break would do them good. He’d refused, and refused even to discuss it. He didn’t tell her about the way he’d cried silently, grieving for a father he’d never really known, about how he remembered that he hadn’t even cried at his mother’s funeral. He kept it all locked inside, and though he wasn’t aware of it at the time, his reason began to slip away.
    Things got worse after that. His work started sliding, and people at the agency were starting to ask questions. He’d overhear Louise on the phone, and when he’d try to discern what she was saying, she’d hang up, avoiding him if he questioned her about who she’d been talking to. He spent hours at night in Holly’s room, just sitting quietly in the dark watching her sleep. He remembered thinking it was all falling away from him, that he was letting Holly down, unable to live up to the responsibility he felt for her happiness. Louise came in one night and found him holding Holly, pleading with her not to grow up hating him as she cried in distress.
     
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    It went on for months. Near the end, he knew Louise was planning to leave him and was convinced she had found somebody else. He bought a gun, unsure of what he was going to do with it, and he kept it for weeks in his desk at work. When he followed her one day, she met a man he didn’t recognize, and he watched them have coffee in a cafe, talking earnestly across the table with their heads close together. Before they left, the man took her hand and a look Michael recognized passed between them. It was the way Louise had once looked at him. At the door