Chapter 1

The accident was alarming in its brevity. The concise screech of tires. The crackling smash of metal on ­metal. My Corolla’s twelve-foot lurch into the (thankfully) ­unoccupied intersection despite my foot planted firmly on the brake. It was a frigid January evening, and I’d been stopped at a red light on the corner of Sherbourne and Highway 2 when this butterscotch-coloured pickup truck hit a rind of black ice and sailed right into my bumper. The next thing I knew, my neck was twanging with whiplash and I had the wind knocked out of me after slamming sternum first into my deploying airbag.

Because I work for an insurance company, I knew, even in those first fretful moments, just how ordinary this accident was. Fender-benders happened all the time in our city, especially during winter when the streets and roads were unpredictably slick. The guy who hit me, despite having a pair of rubber testicles dangling from his hitch and a small, discreet Confederate flag decal on his back window, was incredibly apologetic and kind in the moments after our accident.

“Ah jeez, mister, I’m sorry…I’m so sorry…” he kept saying as he waited for the good folks at nine-one-one to come on the line of his cellphone. I waved off his concerns with severalDon’t worry about it sways of my hand, even as pain ricocheted round my neck and shock passed like voltage through my blood. Our collision had drawn notice from the homeless people who congregated under the single, sad overpass down here, the ones who often wandered up and down the light traffic paused at the stoplight, pleading for spare change. This part of the lakeshore was one of the many impoverished neighbourhoods in our city, a place of drab, leaky concrete and empty, garbage-strewn lots, a strip of highway where a lone bus, the number seventy-five, passed through but once an hour. The resident vagrants approached us with curiosity and concern, but like I said, there was nothing unusual about our crash. The truck’s driver seemed pleased when I told him I worked for Percussive Insurance, up on University Avenue, because that’s where his own policy was (home and auto and life bundled together in our popular Assurance One package). Yes, this was going to be a straightforward transaction, a simple swapping of policy numbers. No headache at all.

I was really shaken up, though. The EMTs noticed it right away and, as a precaution, decided to give me a lift to the Sisters of St. Patrick, our city’s lone Cathol