“Oh, g’wan,” Mama had said when I brought that yearbook home. “Legend in your own mind, that’s what you are.”

Little did we know I’d be back here, trying to live as a dying legend. I’m clutching at these silly, trivial remnants of my past, trying to patch over the frays, the rips, the tears in who I am, who I thought I was, and who I won’t get the chance to be. Meanwhile, Allie stands on the brink of getting her life back, and Char is still off gallivanting around the globe like the reckless wreck she’s always been. For a while I thought I had a shot at being a redemption story. The gritty Cape Breton girl who comes from multi-generational dysfunction but manages to pull herself up by the dirty old pit boot straps, go down the road, make a name for herself, and never look back.

First, I bolted to Halifax, where my nickname followed me, as did Char and Allie and half the people we knew. Because we all wanted to be anywhere but home. When I finished university there, the only logical step was to go bigger. Farther. To Toronto, where I could really morph myself into whatever I imagined I could be. Alone. Walking down Yonge Street that first time felt like floating, like I was this empty vessel being carried along by a cool current of anonymity. No one spoke to me, no one made eye contact, no one gave a rat’s ass about my father’s name or my mother’s past or the fact that my skirt was too short and tight. I could be whoever I wanted. In Toronto, I was Stacey Fortune. Stacey Fortune was so urbane. Edgy but classy. Ate dim sum and drank Shiraz. Didn’t cut and dye her own hair, or reek of pot smoke and cheap perfume. Stacey Fortune got into a course at a Toronto university and got a certificate. In marketing. She was going to make it on her own in the big city, come hell or high water. She hustled, she networked, and she landed a half-decent job. Eventually, she even landed a boyfriend named Dave, who played piano, downhill skied, and delivered pick-up lines in multiple sexy-sounding languages. Stacey Fortune was a success story. Crow Fortune was but an amusing anecdote that would linger in the gossipy minds of a backwoods island on the edge of nowhere special.

This time last year, I was prancing around Toronto with an antique diamond engagement ring on my finger, nibbling organic wedding cake samples, oohing and aahing at exotic flowers being beautifully humiliated into things called tussie-mussies and nosegays, and even entertaining the idea of growing another human being inside my aging uterus. It took me seven years of chameleoning myself into Dave Salyszyn’s idea of wife material — worthy of his grandmother’s jewellery and his unpronounceable last name. Then, when that particular version of Stacey Fortune’s Dream Life went to hell in a philandering handbasket last New Year’s Eve, I managed to ignore Mama’s litany of “I told ya so’s” and yank myself into yet another iteration of victory.