Not a box. Not a ribbon. A brown paper bag, slightly damp on the bottom from the cream, which he held out to me on the snowy corner of Saint-Denis and Rachel with the expression of a man who was not entirely sure this was a smooth move or a weird one.
"The lady almost didn't sell it to me," he said. "I think she thought I was lying about knowing someone who likes these."
I stood there on the sidewalk, holding a religieuse in January, and my sternum did a thing I was not prepared for.
But first: the version of me that showed up to those dates.
The preparation ritualtook two hours. Sometimes two and a half.
Not because I'm high-maintenance — though I absolutely am, but in a way I've carefully rebranded as "having standards" — but because there were steps. There was an order. There was a system.
Step one: outfit. Which sounds simple, except each option had to pass the triple filter —does it look effortful enough to show I care, casual enough to show I don't care too much, and weather-appropriate enough that I won't die on the walk from the métro?Montreal in January reduces your wardrobe options to "puffy" or "hypothermia," and neither of those is a vibe.
Step two: makeup. The kind that's engineered to look like I'm barely wearing any. Brown-black mascara, not black-black, because black-black announced itself. Twenty minutes of foundation, concealer, setting powder, and one careful coat calibrated to communicateI woke up like this, if "this" required a color-correcting primer and a beauty blender.
Step three: the mirror debrief. Turning slowly. Checking angles. Asking myself the question I asked before every date, every job interview, every first impression I'd ever made:Would someone look at this person and think she has her life together?
The answer had to be yes. The answer was always yes. Because I made sure of it.
And then I'd walk out the door, get on the 55 bus or the orange line, and become someone else entirely.
He never questioned it. Why would he?
I should describe him.The sketch version, I mean — the one I was constructing in my head during those first few dates, before everything got rearranged by a hospital bed and an icy slope.
Ethan Morin was — is — a person who takes up more space than he means to. Not in an arrogant way. In a structural way. Wide shoulders. Forearms you get from pulling people out of things for a living.
The first time I saw him was at a vernissage on Saint-Laurent — a friend of a friend's photography exhibit, one of those openings where everyone holds a plastic cup of wine at the exact same angle and pretends to have opinions about composition. My friend Marc had dragged me. "You need to stop working on Friday nights," he'd said, which was rich coming from a man who answers emails during brunch, but I went because saying no to Marc requires more energy than saying yes.
Marc introduced us how people introduce two humans they don't think will matter to each other: "Nora, this is Ethan. Ethan, Nora. Ethan's a firefighter." Then he wandered off to get more wine.
I remember thinking two things:he looks like he could carry a couch up a flight of stairs without stopping,andhis smile does something to his eyes that I find structurally inconvenient.
Laugh lines. Deep ones. The kind that come from finding things genuinely funny, not from performing amusement for social convenience. I could tell the difference.
We talked for maybe fifteen minutes. Pleasant. Forgettable. A conversation where someone asks what you do and you say "graphic design" and they say "oh, cool" and that's the entire creative exchange. He mentioned his cats. I mentioned my deadline. We said "nice to meet you" and that was supposed to be it.
Except two weeks later, I landed a project — community safety branding for a nonprofit — and I needed someone whocould walk me through fire safety procedures for the visual storytelling component. And I remembered the firefighter from Marc's vernissage.
I texted Marc:Hey, can I get Ethan's number? I have a work question.
Marc sent it with a winky emoji. I ignored the winky emoji.
I called Ethan. Professional. Breezy. "Hi, we met at Marc's show? I'm working on a design project and I have a few questions about emergency protocols — could I buy you a coffee?"
He said yes.
I told myself it was a work meeting. I told myself this while changing my outfit three times and applying the kind of makeup designed to look like I wasn't wearing any. The coffee was at a place near his station. He arrived seven minutes early, which I know because I was twelve minutes early and already hiding in the bathroom pretending I'd just gotten there.
"You're early," he'd said, smiling.
"I was in the neighborhood," I'd said, which was a lie. I lived forty minutes away by bus.
The work question took about four minutes. The coffee took an hour and a half.
On the second date, dinner at a place in Little Italy that I'd picked because the lighting was flattering and they served the portions small enough that I wouldn't have thehow am I supposed to eat spaghetti attractivelycrisis, he'd walked me home in the snow and we'd taken the long way through Parc Jarry because neither of us wanted it to end but neither of us was going to say that. The snow was the dry kind that stacks on branches like confectioner's sugar, and Montreal looked how it does in the tourism ads — the way that makes you forget about the potholes and the February wind chill that feels like a personal attack.
He walked on the downhill side of the sidewalk. Every time. Without mentioning it.
