When the doctor had told him, in that stupid pink-carpeted room in the hospital, full of plants and shit as if that made what got said in there any better, that Sylvia’s cancer was in the womb and that it would be a matter of days, he’d experienced a kind of elation. It was anger, and unimaginable grief, but it fired him up. He would go in there and get that cancer the way he went out and pulled in a thief. Yes, it would all be okay. Staff Sergeant Craig McGee to the rescue. We Always Get Our Man. Except you couldn’t arrest cancer. She’d died so doped up with morphine Craig doubted if she’d even known he was there. But he was. He held her cool thin hand as she let out one small breath and never took another. That was her death. Banal and pointless. He didn’t even call the nurse, just sat and looked at her, knowing it was over, that she’d gone. What was that garbage some writer said about not really dying, just going into another room? She was dead. There was, as far as Craig was concerned, no other room. This life was the only room there ever was, and Sylvia had left it and shut the door quietly behind her.

He envied Estelle Reader her grief. The grotesque and spectacular end to Joe’s life seemed to have a drama, a showmanship that gave it meaning. He could never say it to anyone, but he felt it. Sylvia’s death meant nothing to anyone but him, and even then it was more about his grief than her life. Lots of people died of cancer. The hospital in Calgary checked them in and out like library books, and nothing made those guys in white surgical trouser suits raise an eyebrow. But they would have raised an eyebrow if they’d seen Joe Reader. That made Joe’s death special and Sylvia’s ordinary, and sometimes Craig could hardly bear to think that anything about Sylvia could have been ordinary.

If anyone was ordinary it was him. At least he had been. Now though, he could hardly remember the thick-skinned unthinking cop he’d been for nearly two decades, letting the extraordinary events of life and death that were unavoidable in his job float past him as though he were immune. Not the kind of immunity that made him feel immortal. More as if he didn’t really notice he was alive. Taking things for granted. That time in Scotland, they’d walked on the beach in the Outer Hebrides and Sylvia had lain down on the cold wet sand, sifting through some shells. She’d picked ten tiny, delicate half-moon pink shells and laid them out in front of her.

‘Look. Babies’ fingernails.’