Monday December 16th

“Crap,” Kian frowned when he saw the message his assistant, Anna had left before she’d finished for the night.

“What’s wrong?” Bram asked. His friend had his own legal practice on the floor below theirs and so they’d asked for his opinion on the snafu he and Ben had been trying to untangle all afternoon and evening.

“Nothing,” Kian pocketed the slip of paper. It was after midnight and he was sorely tempted to sleep on the sofa in his office again rather than make the long journey home. “My wife must have been trying to get in touch with me this afternoon, that’s all.”

“Uh oh,” Bram patted him on the back, “sounds like somebody’s in the proverbial dog house.”

“Nah, Cate’s cool. She understands that things are hectic right now but they’ll settle down.”

“If you say so,” Bram whistled as they walked along the corridor to the bank of elevators, “but I recall you saying those exact same words to me three months ago and I haven’t seen any sign of things settling down yet so you might want to think about purchasing an extravagant bouquet of flowers or an expensive piece of jewellery before you head home tonight.”

Kian shook his head, “Cate’s not into material things.”

“Then you’d better work out what she is into and buy the biggest, flashiest one of those instead.”

After he left Bram, Kian got in his SUV and started the long drive home. When his eyes drooped for the third time, he pulled into the parking lot of a twenty-four hour diner. If he was going to make it home without an accident, he needed coffee stat. The diner was almost empty and he didn’t feel like making small talk with the blue-haired waitress so he got his coffee to go.

He leaned back against the door of his SUV, listening to the traffic noise from the freeway close by and sipped the coffee. It wasn’t the best coffee he’d ever tasted, in fact it bore more than a passing resemblance to tar but he could feel the caffeine already hitting his bloodstream.

He took another sip of coffee and wondered again why Cate had called the office this afternoon. Maybe she was still having trouble convincing Sierra to give up her old toys for Christmas. They’d told her that she had to choose ten toys she didn’t play with anymore to put in a sack under the tree on Christmas Eve so Father Christmas could take them back to the North Pole, fix them up and leave new ones instead. Sierra thought ten was way too much and had been trying to haggle them down to eight. His lips twitched when he thought about his youngest daughter’s feisty determination. God help the world when she grows up.

But Cate wouldn’t have bothered him at the office with something trivial like that. He’d been away from home so much that Cate had always been the primary parent. After a few mishaps while she was pregnant with Sierra, they’d both worked hard to make sure that all three of their children knew that what Cate said went and it wasn’t worth trying to play them off against each other because he would always back his wife one hundred percent.

When he finally got home, he did a quick sweep of the downstairs to check that all of the doors and windows were locked, looked in on their sleeping children and then went into the master bedroom. Cate was asleep but her face was lit up by the moonlight streaming in through the window and that sight made every second of the long journey home worth it.

He stripped down to his boxers and climbed into bed, careful not to jostle her too much. She must have fallen asleep reading again and he winced when he saw her reading material. It was one of her favourites – she’d told him about it several months ago and he couldn’t ignore the similarities between them and the fictional couple in the book. The husband worked too much and the wife felt neglected. He loved Cate but he couldn’t remember the last time they’d sat down and done something as simple as have a meal together just the two of them.

He picked up the book and looked at the front cover which showed a log cabin in the woods.

Bram’s words from earlier came back to him. “You’d better work out what she is into and buy the biggest, flashiest one of those instead.”

He reached for his phone and sent their friend Julian a quick text. He had the perfect idea for an anniversary present for his wife.