Page 4 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Mountain Man

The laugh is louder this time. Fuller. My neighbor's cat, who sits on the fence between our yards judging me through the window every night, startles and disappears.

Holden. Thank you for saving Mango. And for answering a stranger's weird cow questions at midnight.

Go to sleep, Mara.

So I do.

Except I don't,really. Sleep has been a negotiation for months. Maybe years. The bed in my apartment above my parents' garage, the apartment they let me convert when I moved backafter breaking off my engagement to Tunde, is comfortable enough. Clean sheets. Good mattress. Weighted blanket Chioma bought me last Christmas. But my brain doesn't shut off. Hasn't since I gave Tunde back his ring, moved out of our Yorkville condo, watched my mother's face collapse in real time.

Two years ago. Two years, and my mother still introduces me to people as "Imara, who was engaged to Dr. Oladipo, you remember him, wonderful family."

The engagement lasted fourteen months. Tunde is a good man. Genuinely good. Cardiology fellow at Sunnybrook, tall, speaks Yoruba to his grandmother on the phone every Sunday, remembers anniversaries. My mother loved him. His mother loved me. Our families fit together so cleanly it was almost architectural, two Nigerian families in Scarborough whose children were doing everything right.

Except I wasn't doing anything. I was disappearing. Shrinking into the shape Tunde needed, the shape my mother approved of, the shape that made everyone else comfortable. Planning a wedding I didn't want in a church I didn't attend for a life that looked perfect from every angle except the one where I was standing.

Chioma was the one who said it. Sitting in her car outside the bridal shop on Bloor, watching me cry into a garment bag. "Mara. Do you even want to marry this man?"

And the answer, the honest answer, the one I couldn't say to my mother or his mother or anyone at any of the three engagement parties they threw, was I don't know who I want because I don't know who I am.

So I gave back the ring. Moved into the garage. Started Marrow & Light with six hundred dollars, a second-hand pouring pot, and the YouTube education of a woman with absolutely nothing left to lose.

Two years later, my candles are in four Toronto boutiques. Revenue is growing. Slowly, but growing. My mother refers to it as "Imara's little project" in the same tone she'd use to describe a child's finger painting on the refrigerator.

This is the life I chose. This converted garage with its pouring station, its drying racks, its shelves of essential oils organized by note profile. The life where nobody asks me what I want because nobody believes this is an answer.

A week passesbefore I text Holden again.

Do you ever treat anything cute? Like a baby deer? Or is it all moody cows and large things with hooves?

Twenty minutes.

I treated an eagle last month. Broken wing. Hit a power line outside Kaslo.

Did it make it??

She's at a rehab center in Creston. Should fly again by September.

That's beautiful.

It was a lot of blood and a bird trying to take my eye out with her beak. But sure. Beautiful.

You're very grumpy for someone who saves eagles.

I've been told.

The rhythm establishes itself without either of us naming it. A text every few days becomes every other day becomes nightly. Always late. Always after the rest of my life has gone quiet and the only sound is wax cooling on the racks.

He tells me about a horse with colic. A rancher's dog who ate a porcupine, quills and all. A black bear cub he relocated from someone's crawl space while the homeowner screamed from the truck.

You just... picked up a bear cub?

It was small.

Holden. It was a BEAR.

A small bear.

Three weeks in, I tell him about the engagement. Not the whole thing. Just the edges. Just enough.