He couldn’t wait and he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know where to start. He only had the memory of her face and her black hoodie with a weird design on it. Her face, that dull frozen look of dead eyes and the tiny stain of red, a red drip bleached into the corner of her right lip. Billy knew that was blood. Old blood. Very old blood.

He had seen dead faces in his former line of work, but none of them stuck with him the way the young woman’s did. When he was at war, the dead faces were casualties. Casualties of their messed-up countries. She a was casualty of Canada. An Indigenous casualty of Canada, but no one cared. Why would they?

He had to find out something about her. The cops weren’t moving on it. Billy did what everyone does nowadays. He started looking up hoodies online. It was the only thing he had to go on. Here he was, a decorated soldier—and there was this Indigenous woman with a weird hoodie. He downloaded a picture of a hoodie that looked a bit like hers. He tucked it into his pocket and got into his car. He would start on 95th Street.

So dark. So cold. If she got across the river things would be better, Bunny thought. If she got across the river she’d be away from downtown. Away from all of them. The people at The Hope. The people at the Royal Alex. Away from all of them. All those people who hurt her. The people who took him away from her. Her boy. Her baby. Her Adam. When the ancestors sent him to her, she knew he was their gift. The best gift she could imagine, and she talked to him from the moment she knew he was inside of her. Playing and growing and laughing while he did somersaults inside her belly. She loved him before his first breath.

Beside Bunny, Riita nodded her old head, making the flap of her red kerchief bob up and down on the back of her creased neck. She could still remember all the love she had for her babies from long ago, when she was a young mom. Riita tightened her grip on Bunny’s elbow. She’s breaking, Riita thought. Got to get her to the fire as fast as I can.

Bunny kept remembering. Remembering how the nurse put him onto her chest. She knew her baby knew her. She knew he was taking in her smell, and he would always remember that smell. When she looked at him for the first time, she believed in God. She believed in the beauty of life. She believed in all the good spirits and the ancestors who stood next to her and smiled down at him the way Mary had smiled down at her little boy, Jesus.