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Having often found that I had worked through lunch, I got in the habit of taking a mid-afternoon coffee break. Our offices - Butler & Stowe (you might remember them if you lived in Victoria during the late seventies, early eighties) - were situated around the Quadra and Bay area, in a converted residential home. Most of the lawyers frequented the nearby pub, but I would set out across the Bay Street Bridge for a small family-run diner I once happened upon completely by accident. Walking to and from the diner, taking solace in its quiet anonymity, its no-nonsense décor, gave me the boost I needed to get through the workday, which, back then, could extend well into the evening.

I had been working on a land dispute case between a pulp and paper mill and one of the island's northern aboriginal communities. The mill - our client - had logged a section of forest that both parties claimed rights to. The band was suing for damages to its territory (some graves had been disturbed, artifacts had gone missing) and for the market value of the cut timber, as well as demanding an injunction to prevent any future harvest. It was not the biggest case I had been involved in, but it was generating a lot of publicity and, as such, we had to be on our toes.

Some could say that by representing the pulp and paper mill, Butler & Stowe had teamed up with the "bad guys." But this way of thinking about the law has never interested me. The good and the bad - for there are, I have learned, such definitive categories in the world - are divided between people lawyers represent, not between lawyers themselves. Still, there are those who will always see things differently. The summer our firm took on the case I have been describing, we received a number of hostile and sometimes threatening phone calls. Someone mailed us an Adidas box containing human excrement. One of our senior associates had a brick hurled through his car windshield (he wasn't inside, luckily). No one knew exactly who was behind all of this, whether it was an organized group or just a few extremists. But this was also around the time when things were heating up in Clayoquot Sound and loggers were cutting into spiked trees. People at our firm were anxious. Who wouldn't have been?

I was relatively new to the practice of law then. I had a young family that was solely dependent on my income, my success. My wife, Beth, had just become pregnant with our third child. I have heard others speak of this time in their lives, a time when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by everything you have ever wished for. It's not that you stop wishing - there will always be new things that come along - but that you are still close enough to not having what you now know you can't live without.

So maybe I was spending more time looking over my shoulder than I was used to. Maybe the kind of rigorousness I had been applying to my work had made me more attuned to the varying particulars of my surroundings. But one afternoon, as I stepped out of the diner, I realized I was being followed. Sitting on a bench across the street was a man I had noticed the day before. He was the same man without question - a large, black-haired, Roy Orbison-type man - who had been parked in a blue Buick Skylark down the block from our home.

My first response upon seeing him was to pretend that I hadn't in fact seen him. It is a strategy I seem to have deployed completely through instinct. I didn't think to approach or confront him, though later - while going over the scenario repeatedly - I would envision myself pulling him up by his collar, shouting in his face, demanding that he tell me his name, who he was with. But at the time I was just reacting, and by not doing these things, by making him, instead, believe that he still had me, I was probably empowering myself the best one could hope for given the situation.

After I left the diner I kept walking, back over the bridge toward Butler & Stowe. Around the Armories I crossed the street mid block, using my traffic check to see if he was tailing me. He was, though he did so at a distance, taking slow but long strides, his left leg revealing a barely perceptible limp. I looked back once more like this before reaching the office. Inside I watched for him through the window, but he had apparently turned back. I would never see him again.

I told everyone at the firm what had happened. Michael Butler, the older and more paternalistic of the two founding partners, had a sergeant friend of his come by to take my statement. Alone in my office I dialed Beth at home, but after the first ring I hung up, not wanting to worry her. Though in bed the next morning I did tell her, for it finally became too difficult to keep the incident from her any longer.

As I spoke, Beth watched me, her arm under her pillow. She let me say all I needed to say and then, calmly, asked me a series of questions, some of which the sergeant had asked - Did I remember the license plate from the first time I saw him? (I hadn't); Would I recognize him if he appeared again? (In a heartbeat).

I must have been distraught because she said, "Come here," and pulled me over to her side. I can hear her saying these words perfectly, and not in the voice I am accustomed to now but in her young woman's voice, a voice I have to otherwise concentrate on to evoke. She held me against her bare bosom, which was already quite swollen even though she had barely started showing. I could hear the rhythmic breathing inside her chest, the amplified flowing, channeling sounds of her body sustaining itself and our child. "It's okay," she said. She was touching my forehead, my hair. "We'll be okay."

***

All of this happened over twenty years ago. The land dispute case ended up settled in a way that was satisfactory for both sides. All of the problems that Butler & Stowe had been experiencing went away as quickly as they had arisen. The firm is no more now, though not through any wrongdoing. Butler died in a skiing accident at Mount Washington and Stowe simply retired. The little diner I used to frequent is also gone. The entire block on which it sat is now one big townhouse development, buildings presently old enough to be showing signs of disrepair. But I had moved on to start my own firm long before any of these changes. The child my wife had been pregnant with has recently left for school, the last to depart in that way. Beth and I are still in the same house. It is the only house we have ever owned, and I don't expect we will ever leave.

Last fall, shortly after our daughter moved out, I took it upon myself to install an Ethernet line in her room so that Beth could have a space to do email and pay bills. I am no handyman, but I had once spliced cable to the television in our den and thought I could save both the hassle and the expense of arranging for someone else to come in. So one weekend morning, after we had finished breakfast and Beth had left for her exercise class, I gathered up the things I would need for such a task and entered the crawlspace.

The crawlspace runs along a back portion of the ground floor. My daughter's room is on the floor above, but is located at the front of the house. In order to gauge where the hole I needed to drill would poke through from upstairs, I had to shine my flashlight into the dark, empty space of joists and girders that separates the two floors. It was while peering down one of these hollows that I discovered a brown legal size envelope, just within my reach. Inside were four eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs, and a letter.

I recognized the diner immediately. I recognized it before I recognized myself, sitting prominently at a table behind the front window. The other photographs were also of me, and even though they were clearer, closer shots - one had been taken near Butler & Stowe, the other two presumably somewhere between work and home - I don't believe I would have identified myself as the subject any quicker.

The letter had been composed on a typewriter. It was addressed to my wife.

Dear Mrs. O'Connor,

Please find enclosed the materials you requested as per our phone conversation. As you have been assured, these are the only existent pictures that pertain to your commission. In the event of recursive legal matters, it is our policy to hold onto negatives. I hope you find this acceptable. Should you ever wish to continue with us, it would also be beneficial to have them on file.

Changes of heart are not uncommon among patrons of our services. In fact, they are one of the more encouraging things about a profession in which so little can be encouraging. I believe that it is in every man's and woman's heart to think the best of his or her wife or husband. Sometimes not knowing can be better than knowing, despite our human need for the truth.

Sincerely,

Jim Evans
CoastLine Investigations Inc.

If Beth had been home I know for certain that I would have gone to her. Even after the initial shock had worn off, I planned to sit her down the instant she returned. But then I read the letter again. I flipped through the photographs. After a while - I have no idea how long it was - I put these items back in their envelope, returned the envelope to where I had found it. I resumed my work routing the cable. By the time Beth did come home the computer was up and running, and I stood behind her as she clicked on icons and marveled at how fast everything popped open.

***

Now that the house is quiet and I work less than I used to, I will occasionally return to these photographs. I like seeing the diner again. Other than when I drive by its former location, I haven't had much cause to think about it. And I like the street shots - the old cars, the sign postings, the parking meters, all things that I had taken for granted at the time but that now stand out, it would seem, as the accoutrements of another world.

Whoever printed the photographs did a poor job aligning the borders, suggesting that the film was finished in-house. And this makes me wonder what other images might have been developed alongside mine - washed in the same emulsion, clipped to the same string - what lives were about to be turned upside down, and which of them shared my reprieve.

Mostly, I am interested in looking at myself. I do this not out of vanity but because I appear fully unlike the man I have always believed myself to have been back then. I have sought other photographs from that era - the posed stills from Christmases, children's birthdays, dinner parties - looking for this same disparity. But I have yet to find it. Don't think that I am distressed by what I have uncovered. On the contrary, I am intrigued. At this age, I couldn't have asked for a more blessed gift.