“I only teach yin. But you know, even if you spend the whole time in Corpse Pose, it doesn’t really matter. ” He takes their chairs to the wall and stacks them with the others.

“No pressure,” he adds. “But as a little extra encouragement, I have a book at the studio I think you’ll like. It helped me a lot during my first year. Still does, actually.”

“What book?”

“Ah, well,” he says as starts walking backwards toward the exit. “That’s for me to know. See you tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” she shrugs.

“Maybe’s better than no.” He shakes his fist as if celebrating. “I’ll take it!” Then he turns around and waves her goodbye.

She watches him exit the church basement and disappear up the stairs. A few moments later, she realizes she’s still grinning.

She expects Anchor to pull, and Gloom to bully.

But they don’t.

Not a bit.

33.

Kavita’s dreams that night are a living watercolour of images bleeding into one another, a haunting reel of gunshots, leapers, bloated corpses, hanging bodies, bloodied razors, empty caskets, car windows blackened out with soot and the choking smell of exhaust. Nightmares made all the more frightening by virtue of their truth, their belonging to the other survivors she had met at group and the people they have lost.

Now, as she lies in bed in the sallow morning light and wrestles with the throbbing ache of her first therapy hangover, she realizes something she has felt since Sunil’s passing but hasn’t been able to articulate: Suicide doesn’t end suffering. It spreads it around. It’s that time of January that is synonymous with semi-hibernation, thick sweaters, and peak vitamin D deprivation—a seasonal assault Kavita prefers to wait out within greenhouse-like warmth of her glass-walled condo. Today, however, for the second time in as many sunrises, she emerges from her cave, coaxed not by a change in the nostril-fusing weather, but rather by the possibility of at last finding another bear like her.

With the Styrofoam crunch of snow underfoot, Kavita trudges through shin-deep drifts along quiet residential streets of her neighbourhood, lined with ice-dipped trees, on her way to the yoga studio where Hawthorn teaches. Fat, wet flakes fall like albino moths and wreath her fur-trimmed hood in a sparkling halo. Occasionally, she pulls her gaze from the sidewalk to marvel at the deadly and beautiful icicles that hang from steep-roofed houses, some of them as tall as she is.