The Calgary airport smelled like coffee and jet fuel the day I picked him up in 2015. I was fifty. My notebooks were stacked in the passenger footwell because I had been writing the whole drive across the country, one province at a time, motel to motel. We had left Ontario together and I had loved every mile of it. Prairie sky, mountains rising like a promise. I thought we were building something. He walked out through the glass doors with a duffel bag and a look I didn't recognize. He had flown ahead to sort the apartment while I finished the drive. Something about him had shifted in the air between us. He got in the car and asked if I'd stopped at the liquor store. That was the first sentence of the next six years. Calgary itself was good to me. I liked the wide streets and the wind that came down off the Rockies. I went to the Stampede and ate pancakes off a paper plate under a white tent. I watched the chuckwagons and cheered until my throat hurt. I saw the Foo Fighters at the Saddledome and felt my ribs shake. I kept writing. I filled notebooks at the kitchen table while he slept off whatever the night before had been. The drunkenness came first. Then the lies, small ones stacked into bigger ones. Then the other women, and the money missing from the account, and the mornings I sat on the edge of the bed doing math I didn't want to do. I had nowhere to go. My daughter was across the country. My savings were thin. I stayed. I stayed for years. I made the best of it because that is what I know how to do. I went to concerts alone. I walked the river paths. I told myself the woman I used to be, the loud one who took up space, was still in there. She had just gone quiet to get through this. Then one Tuesday in 2021 he came home at four in the morning and lied about where he had been, and I didn't argue. I made coffee. I sat at the table with my notebook and I wrote down a number: two suitcases. That was all I would take. I wrote down a city: Perth. My daughter had a second-floor apartment and an extra room. I booked the flight that afternoon. I didn't tell him. Two weeks later I stood at the departures curb at that same sprawling airport where I had picked him up six years earlier. Same glass, same smell of coffee and fuel. I had two suitcases and the notebooks. He was still asleep in the apartment I was done paying half of. I walked through the doors. The quiet woman inside me opened her mouth for the first time in a long while. She said, good.

Before the airport goodbye, before the two suitcases, there was a Tuesday night in October 2018 when I still believed Calgary could be good. The Foo Fighters announced a show at the Saddledome and I bought two tickets the morning they went on sale. They were my favourite band in the universe. I was not going to miss it, no matter what shape I was in. My legs were bad that week. The chorea made walking a negotiation. I took the stairs one at a time and held the rail like it owed me money. He watched me from the couch and asked if I was sure. I told him I was sure. I put on my boots and my jean jacket and I drove us to the arena myself. The curved white roof rose over the parking lot like a giant saddle. Inside, the concourse was packed. The smell of pot hung in the air thick enough to chew. I did not care. I bought a bottle of water and we found our seats. He sat down and stayed down. Arms folded. Jacket zipped. I understood in the first song that I had brought the wrong person. The stage was low and the crowd in front of us stood the whole night. If I wanted to see the band, I had to stand too. So I stood. My knees shook and my hip burned and I stood anyway. I sang every word. I danced the small careful dance my body could still do. I held the seat back in front of me and I moved. The drums hit my chest. The lights washed over the seats in white and red. Halfway through, he leaned close to my ear. He asked if I wanted to leave. I looked at him. I looked at the stage. They had not played Everlong yet. "Not on your life," I said. I turned back to the band. I did not check on him again. Somewhere in me the loud woman I used to be sat up and paid attention. She had been quiet for a long time. She liked this. She liked me standing when it hurt. She liked me refusing. They played Everlong near the end. The whole floor sang it back at the stage. I cried a little and did not wipe my face. My legs were done. My throat was raw. I stayed until the house lights came up. We walked out through the concrete tunnels in silence. He was angry. I was not. I drove us home with the radio on and my hands steady on the wheel. That night I lay in bed and understood something plain. I could have a good time without him. I already had. The proof was in my sore legs and my ringing ears. I did not know yet that I would leave him. But I knew now that I could go places alone.

Years before the airport in Perth, before the Foo Fighters night, I lived in a rented basement suite under a couple who took the upstairs. That summer they brought in tenants for their spare room. A man and a woman, quiet in the wrong way. He wouldn't meet my eye at the mailbox. She smiled too fast. I kept to myself and kept writing. My stories were the good part of that year. I had rebuilt Racum Raccoon and Fawn and Spot into a proper website for the grandkids and any child who wandered in. Years of work. I typed on the tablet at the kitchen table each night, thumb sore, coffee cold. The site had a small following. A teacher in Ontario wrote to say her class read a story every Friday. The first sign was the credit card. Two charges from Walmart I had not made. Then three. I called the bank and cancelled the card. I told myself it was a skimmer at the gas pump. The second sign was worse. I opened my site on the tablet one morning and the home page was gone. In its place: photos I will not describe. My name still at the top. Fawn and Spot buried under filth. I sat at the table and my hands shook so hard I dropped the tablet on the wood. I did not cry. I got angry in a clean, useful way. The loud woman I used to be stood up inside me and took the wheel. I called the police first. A constable came within the hour and took a statement. I told her about the upstairs tenant, the charges, the timing. She wrote it down and said they would speak with him. She told me to change every password from a device he had never touched. I walked to the library that afternoon and used a public computer. I bought a new domain name. Different word, cleaner, mine. I locked the account behind a password he could not guess in ten lifetimes. Then I came home and I built the site again. From nothing. I had the stories in a binder because I never trusted the cloud with the handwritten drafts. I typed the first one back into a blank page on the tablet that night. Racum Raccoon, chapter one. Then chapter two. My neck ached. I kept going. It took me three weeks. The new site went live on a Sunday. I emailed the teacher in Ontario the new address and she wrote back the same day. Upstairs, the couple were gone by then. The police had come a second time and the landlord had asked them to leave. I sat on the back step with the tablet on my knees and refreshed the home page. Fawn. Spot. Racum. My name at the top where it belonged. My hands were steady. I had lost years of work and won something else back. I did not know its name yet, but I could feel it settling in my chest like a returning tenant.