Margot and I had been living together for two years now. Finding Tofino too limiting, we’d reluctantly made the move to Vancouver about a year ago. She’d set up her own small catering company, and I’d left the survey business to resume work as a freelance...
Our marriage of convenience broke up in Yellowknife. We’d been together for about three years. She was Swiss-French, and I was English-Canadian. Meeting in Indonesia, we’d travelled together for two years, overland through Asia to Europe. Then a year in S...
Margot worked as a sous-chef in a restaurant owned by friends of mine. We’d crossed paths a few times, but nothing of consequence had ever happened between us. From a distance, I had taken note of her extraordinary pale gray eyes, and the way she spoke wi...
It was the late nineties. I was twenty-two and had just arrived back in Santiago after six very long months in southern Chile. Hired by a Canadian forestry company, I’d been managing a large timber survey about as far south in Patagonia as you could get....
It was morning now, around 7 a.m. While Kate, Jacob and Megan slept, I’d gone back into the house, quietly grabbed a jacket and some boots, and headed off for a pre-dawn walk in the Mendocino Headlands. Three hours later, trudging along the cliffs in the...
It was now mid-March, and we were returning home from a month in Bali. During the first week of our trip, we’d focused our attention totally on Michelle, trying to pack as much as we could into seven short days. After she’d returned home to Switzerlan...
Kate and I had been seeing each other for more than six months now. After crossing paths for ten years, we’d finally become an item last summer. From the outset, we’d agreed to an open relationship. ‘Open’ in the sense that, while we would always be...
It was mid-September, but the weather was still unseasonably warm. There were no signs yet of autumn colour. Kate and I had now been seeing each other for almost three months, and I’d started introducing her to some of my closer friends. This weekend, sh...
Kate’s first visit to my house in the country had been quite the experience. The sex that weekend had left my head spinning for days. She called two weeks later, asking if she could come out again. I jumped at the chance. The following Friday, her car...
We’d known each other for many years, getting together about once a month. Kate had been cutting my unruly head of hair for more than a decade. When we first met, she was in her twenties: sharp, lively, full of questions and ideas. Often, as she worked,...
