Dedication

This book is dedicated to all of us Inuit who live beyond the tundra, we who get up and live our lives in the Southern areas of Canada.

We are Inuit no matter where we stand.

Inuttigut: We the Inuit—we are here.

Author’s Note

The stories and characters contained within this work are fictional.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my agent, Stephanie Sinclair, for seeing the value in this work and for believing that others will love reading it.

I would like to thank Anna Comfort O’Keeffe from Douglas & McIntyre for seeing the publication of this work through to the finish.

My biggest thanks goes to Peter Midgley for his humour, patience and for knowing when to hug me at the end of it all. We did it again, Peter. Ma’na my friend.

Amak

Our collision was cosmic. Nothing could stop us from smashing into each other. No other object could get in the way of that hug. That first hug. We had been apart for so long. More than eleven years. Eleven years of silenced voices. No touch. No harm. No foul. I knew her voice before she took the breath that started our first phone conversation in over a decade. You never forget the voice of someone you have loved so hard. It was her, sounding nervous and far away.

The connection made it sound like she was out of the country. That brought me relief. Perhaps she was living abroad, putting an ocean between us. I remember how the tension in my shoulders eased momentarily. Several times over the last decade, I had longed to hear her voice but never wanted to be the person who dialled out first. Time lets life bloom without family members in it. It’s easier that way.

“I’m old now.” Her first three words reminded me what she was like. Always speaking about herself first. Not asking how I was. Never thinking of others. I thought about how the passage of time, in length and in breadth, does not mean that people change within that same span of time. I reminded her that we all were old now. All of us over the age of fifty. All of us past the middle of our middle ages. She blurted out that she had left her long-time husband two years before.

I rallied back with a happy cheer: “Good for you!” Again, the younger one comforting the older one. The one that I had always thought was so much more than me. Taller. Smarter. Prettier. Skinnier. I never hit the mark of any of the standards that she had created to measure me by. I felt childhood shame wrap itself around me like it always did when I was in her presence. There it was again, a cloak of insecurity wrapping its jagged edges around my shoulders.