People always laugh when I say that. How do you live in half a studio? The answer is: you make it work. The “half” wasn’t physical walls; it was space in your head. I slept on a narrow bed by the window and rented the couch area to a young woman who worked nights at a hospital. We shared the kitchenette. We shared the tiny bathroom. We shared awkward silences and unspoken agreements about whose turn it was to buy dish soap.
It wasn’t comfortable. But it paid the mortgage.
That year I worked three jobs. Receptionist during the day, bookkeeper in the evenings, weekend shifts at a hotel front desk where I smiled at strangers and handed them room keys and silently studied the way people with money moved through the world like the floor belonged to them.
I learned how to speak to banks. I learned how to negotiate a better interest rate. I learned to not flinch when someone tried to intimidate me with jargon. I learned to fix a leaky faucet myself because hiring someone cost money I didn’t have.
I learned that exhaustion doesn’t kill you if you have a goal.
At twenty-six, I met Thomas.
He was a teacher—kind, steady, not flashy. We met through a mutual friend at a small dinner party, and he was the kind of man who listened like your words mattered. He didn’t try to impress me. He didn’t talk over me. He asked questions about what I wanted, not what I already had.
When I told him about my property obsession, he smiled in that gentle way and said, “You’re building something.”
I didn’t hear judgment in his voice. I heard admiration.
We married a year later. Not because we were swept away by passion, but because we fit. We made sense. We were two people who understood the value of quiet effort.
Our marriage was good—not dramatic, not cinematic, but solid. We built a life together. We laughed over small things. We argued about paint colors and whether to buy a new couch. He taught teenagers how to read Shakespeare, and I taught myself how to read the city’s zoning bylaws like they were a treasure map.
Thomas wasn’t particularly interested in the business side of my life. He trusted me. That trust felt like love to me, maybe because I’d never had anyone trust me like that before. He didn’t need to control everything. He didn’t need to be the expert. He just said, “You’re better at this than I am,” and let me handle it.
So I did.
I acquired properties slowly, carefully. A duplex here. A small apartment building there. I learned to wait for the right deal, to see through glossy staging and focus on bones—foundation, plumbing, roof, location. I learned to deal with tenants who paid late and contractors who tried to overcharge because I was a woman and they assumed I didn’t know better.
Sometimes Thomas would come with me to look at a place, hands in his pockets, and while I inspected baseboards and checked water pressure, he’d stand quietly and then say things like, “This room feels sad,” or “This place feels like it wants to be loved.” He didn’t analyze numbers. He analyzed energy. It was oddly helpful.
We had a daughter. She’s grown now, living in Toronto with her own family. When she was little, she thought every building belonged to me because I was always looking at buildings, talking about buildings, driving past buildings and saying, “That one has potential.” She used to roll her eyes and say, “Mom, you’re weird,” but then she’d slip her hand into mine on the sidewalk, and I’d think: I’m building something for her too.
For thirty-one years, Thomas and I lived inside our routines. He graded papers at the dining table. I balanced ledgers on a laptop. We took vacations that were more hiking than luxury, because neither of us liked excess for its own sake. We weren’t rich in the way people imagine riches, but we were secure—and that mattered more to me than anything.
Then, three years ago, Thomas died suddenly of a heart attack.
He was sixty-two. I was sixty.
One day he was teasing me about my obsession with property tax assessments, and the next day he was gone. Just… gone. Like a door slamming in a storm.
The grief was overwhelming, and not in the poetic way people describe grief. It wasn’t soft sadness. It was a physical weight that made it hard to breathe. It was waking up in the middle of the night and reaching for him and feeling only cold sheets. It was standing in the grocery aisle staring at two-person meal portions and feeling your throat close up.
It wasn’t just the loss of my husband.
It was the loss of my routine, my companion, the person who knew all my stories. The one who remembered the version of me that existed before I became a woman who managed properties and counted rent cheques and worried about plumbing emergencies at midnight.
I spent a year barely functioning. I went to work because work was the only thing that didn’t collapse. But I moved through my days like a ghost wearing my face. I answered calls. I signed papers. I fixed things. And then I came home to silence so loud it felt like an alarm.
My daughter called every week from Toronto, voice worried.
“Mom, are you eating?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Are you sleeping?”
“Yes,” I lied again.
Sometimes she would say, “Come here for a while,” and I would say, “I can’t,” because my properties were here, my life was here, my grief was stitched into the walls of Vancouver, and I didn’t know who I would be if I left.
Eventually, slowly, I started to come back to life.
Not because grief ended. Grief doesn’t end. It changes shape.
I joined a book club. At first I just sat and listened, surrounded by women talking about characters and plotlines like the world wasn’t falling apart. Then, one day, I heard myself laugh at something someone said, and the sound startled me. It felt like hearing a language I’d forgotten.
I started going to yoga classes. I hated them at first—the deep breathing, the softness, the way people said “release” as if you could let go of sorrow just by stretching your hips. But my body had been holding tension for a year, and slowly, the movement helped.
I traveled to Portugal with a friend. I stood on a windy cliff over the Atlantic, salt on my lips, and for the first time in months I felt something like wonder again. The world was still big. It still held beauty.
And slowly, I remembered who I was before grief.
The woman who had built something from nothing. The girl who had watched her mother mend dresses and decided she wanted a life where you didn’t have to mend everything because you couldn’t afford replacement.
That remembering mattered.
Because that remembering is what made me meet Graham with open eyes instead of empty ones.
I met Graham at a charity fundraiser for the Vancouver Art Gallery about two years ago.
