The memory disappeared.
The boy was still laughing. Jiya was still smiling.
And I was still sitting here with a glass of whisky in my hand, trying not to remember a life that no longer existed.
Jack followed my gaze across the room before looking back at me. “You okay?”
“No,” I said flatly.
He nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought.”
A few minutes later, Jiya stood from the table and walked toward the bar. The boy remained in his chair happily colouring something on a paper placemat that Jack must have given him.
She stopped beside me while Jack reached for a bottle behind the counter.
Then she turned slightly.
Our eyes met.
Up close, I could see the exhaustion in her expression more clearly. It was not the kind of tiredness that came from a long day of work. It was something deeper. Heavier. The kind of burden people carried when life had knocked them down too many times.
Something about it felt painfully familiar.
For the past two years, I had convinced myself that nothing in the world could break through the walls I had built around myself.
Yet the moment I looked into Jiya’s eyes, something shifted.
I did not know her.
I did not know anything about her.
But I knew one thing for certain.
She understood pain.
And for the first time in two years, that realization shook me more than the whisky ever had.
3
JIYA
Lucas started Grade Two in September at a new school that was only minutes away from the house.
While getting him ready for school one morning, I cringed as the memory replayed vividly in my head of the day I had picked him up from summer camp with Oreo sitting in the back seat. The whole drive home had been thick with tension, and even now, remembering it made my chest clench painfully. Lucas had been worried the moment he saw my hand in a sling. His little face had scrunched up with concern, and because I had not been ready to tell him the truth—not the real truth—I had brushed it off and told him I got injured at work.
I bit my lip as I remembered that moment and how, not long after, I had told Lucas that we were not going back to the apartment.
“What do you mean, Mama?” he had asked innocently, unaware that his whole world was about to shift.
“We’re moving to a new village,” I had told him gently. “It’s called Cowichan Bay.”
“But why do we have to move?” he had asked, his voice breaking as tears rolled down his cheeks. “You can get another job. We can stay here or move somewhere smaller.”
Trying to explain something so complicated to a seven-year-old had taken more out of me than I expected. I had already been stretched thin by everything I had been carrying—the fear, the uncertainty, and the grief I kept burying because I did not have the luxury of falling apart.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t,” I had said, forcing steadiness into my voice as I met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “You will love the new place. It has a backyard, and you can run around with Oreo.”
“I don’t want a house,” he had cried. “I want my friends, my school, and my teachers.”
