He could never pin it down, or put a name to it.
When he met and married Pam, the fear receded. It was still there, but greatly diminished. Pam had that effect on his life.
Then he finished work early one evening, rode the elevator to their 40th floor apartment--and found Pam in bed with another man. Enraged, he leapt onto the bed and began choking the intruder.
Someone--it had to have been Pam--truck him on the back of his head with a hard, blunt object. He fell forward, crashing through the bedroom window.
As he plummeted toward the street, Eric suddenly knew what he had always been afraid of: falling to him doom from a great height.