“It’s called a cortado,” Burns said to Alison, referring to the two coffees he brought over along with a pair of little white napkins. She was perched on a high stool looking out the south-facing window at Fahrenheit Café, the trendy spot where he’d asked her to meet him. The coffees came in small clear glasses, the image of a swan neatly drawn in white foam on top.
“I know all about cortados,” Alison said. “I was a barista when I lived in London.” She was going to add she worked at a café when she was a university student two years ago but didn’t. It would have made her sound too young.
He gave her a sly look. “You’ve never tasted one as good as this. They’re real coffee snobs here.”
“Good. I need the caffeine after a sleepless night. You a regular?”
“I come here every morning.”
Alison felt someone come up behind her. She turned and saw a man with short-cropped hair and an impish grin on his handsome face. He slapped Burns on the shoulder and spoke to her.
“Arnold took my five-hour barista course. Star student. I keep trying to convince him to quit this medicine stuff he does and get a real job pulling shots.”
Burns grinned. “Alison, meet Sameer, world-champion barista and teacher extraordinaire.”
“Do you like my coffee?” Sameer asked her.
“I’ve yet to try it.”
“Two sips. The first one only sets your palette,” Sameer said.
“See,” Burns said.
She took a sip. The coffee was not too hot but deliciously warm, the way a cortado was supposed to be. The flavour was bold. Naturally sweet. She took a second sip. He was right. Now she could really taste the richness of the coffee.
“Pretty good,” she said.
“That’s British for ‘very good,’ ” Burns said.
“Pretty damn good,” she said, in as North American an accent as she could muster.
Both men laughed. Sameer slapped Burns on the back again and went back behind the counter.
She lifted her glass and clinked. “To fighting the good fight.”
“To the fight,” he said, a serious look replacing his smile.
She tossed back the rest of her cortado in one gulp and used one of the napkins to dab her lips. Carefully. She’d put on some lipstick before walking into the café and didn’t want to rub it off.
He sipped his cortado without talking. This was the other side of his loud public persona, she thought. The quiet, committed side. She felt at ease to be with someone who wasn’t afraid of silence, like her father.
“How long have you been in Canada?” he asked her after he’d finished his drink.
“About a year and a half. It’s a long story.”
She’d grown up in England with her mum, who’d told her that her father had left when she was a baby, moved to New Zealand, and started a new family. That wasn’t true. Alison was twenty years old when her mother was stricken with a brain tumour. Unbeknownst to Alison, her mum reached out to Ari, whom she’d lived with two decades earlier when she was finishing her graduate degree in Toronto.
A week after her mum died, Alison went to a solicitor’s office and was introduced to this stranger: Toronto homicide detective Ari Greene. Her father. He stayed in London for months, and eventually she decided to try living in Toronto with him. It turned out she had an unknown grandfather as well.
“Do you like the city?” Burns asked.
She looked back into the café. It was filled with well-dressed, energetic young people brimming with confidence and enthusiasm.
“It certainly is modern with the high-rises going up, the building cranes everywhere, and all the glass. People always on the go. It seems there are a lot of rich people here.”
“Seems,” he said with a note of bitterness. “That’s the point. If you want to see the real heart of the city, come with me.”
Outside, he had a smart fixed-speed bicycle that he’d locked up with a thick chain and a heavy-duty square-shaped lock.
“A socially conscious doctor with a super trendy bike,” she said, chiding him as he bent down to unlock it. “You’re such a hipster.”
He laughed a self-deprecating laugh. She liked that.
“I love my fixie. I put on special tires in the fall and ride every day of the year.”
“Rain, snow, sleet, or hail?”
“Three sixty-five. Saving the environment,” he said, stringing the chain around his neck as if it were some kind of warrior’s necklace.
“Cliché millennial,” she quipped.
They walked up Jarvis, a north-south street filled with sleek new condos and office buildings. But after only a few blocks everything changed to empty parking lots, car rental places, and graffiti-filled walls. Instead of well-dressed young people, the sidewalks and alleyways were now filled with hunched-over men and women wearing dirty clothes, huddled together, smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap coffee outside shelters and free-injection sites.
The People on the Street Health Care Clinic was in an old storefront, with chipped-paint-covered bricks and a thick metal door. Inside, the reception room was filled with ragged-looking women sprawled out on low-slung couches, each with a crinkled shopping bag at her feet. To one side an older woman sat behind a linoleum-topped desk that looked to be twenty years old, shuffling through a mound of paperwork.
“Sylvia, meet Alison Greene,” Burns said to the woman. “The TV reporter who covered the protest and actually gave me ninety seconds of air time.”
“Looked more like a minute to me,” Sylvia said. Her voice was gruff and monotone. She rolled her eyes over to Alison. “Welcome to Women’s Day in Paradise.”
“Women come Mondays and Wednesdays,” Burns explained. “Men Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“Fridays we do Pilates, take vegan cooking classes, and tend our organic garden,” Sylvia said, her deep voice flatter than a pancake.
“Translation,” Burns said. “Paperwork for the government so we can get paid. It’s massive.”
“And emergency appointments,” Sylvia said.
“Well, I’m jolly pleased to be here,” Alison said.
Sylvia raised an eyebrow and rolled her eyes back to Burns.
“Forgive Sylvia’s skepticism,” he said. “We’ve had a boatload of reporters come through here all enthusiastic about doing a story on our clinic and nothing ever happens.”
“Perhaps I’ll be different.”
“Why don’t you start by covering the memorial service,” Sylvia said.
“Memorial service?” Alison asked.
“For Nurse Deb,” one of the women on the couches behind Alison said.
“Nurse Deb?” Alison asked.
“The woman who was killed in the valley today,” Burns added. “Word travels fast in our little world. That’s how we got the demonstration together so quickly this morning. Deb was a registered nurse until her life fell apart.”
“Oh,” Alison murmured, feeling foolish.
“Don’t look so shocked, Miss Reporter,” Sylvia said. “Just because these women are down on their luck doesn’t mean that they’re not smarter than half those assholes in the office towers a few blocks from here. Everybody loved Deb. She got lots of people off of the needle.”
Sylvia picked up a clipboard and handed it to Burns. “Fatima’s in Room A. The CAS grabbed her kids again, and she overdosed on the weekend.”
Sylvia returned to her paperwork without another glance at Alison.
Burns took the clipboard and motioned to Alison. “The women here live in constant fear that a social worker from Children’s Aid Society will show up at any time and they’ll lose their children. For years kids were taken away because of false drug tests.”
“That’s horrible.”
“That’s reality. Let’s go see Fatima.”
Alison started to follow him, then turned back. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Sylvia.”
The woman looked up from her desk. Annoyed.
Alison crept back toward the reception desk. “Can I ask you about the memorial service?” she asked.
Sylvia stared at her.
Alison stepped closer. “The details perhaps?” She was trying not to sound as if she was pleading. “Ah, when? Where the memorial is being held?”
Sylvia frowned. She rummaged through the piles of papers, moved a pack of cigarettes out of the way, and somehow found a pad of Post-it notes and a pen. She wrote something on a note and stuck it on the end of her desk.
“Marvin told the cops to do what they want with her body.”
“Marvin?”
Sylvia frowned again. “Deb’s husband.”
“She was married?”
“Yes, lady reporter, Deb was married. For twenty-four years. Marvin wants this over and done so we’re doing it this afternoon. Better for his boys’ sake.”
“Oh, she had a son?” Alison said, feeling like a total idiot.
“Two. Mark and Mitchell. Good kids. Both are in high school, and they do their volunteer hours here.”
“That’s good,” Alison said. Her words sounded so hollow.
“Good? Good would be if the pharmaceutical companies hadn’t made a small fortune turning their mother into a drug addict. Then maybe she’d be alive today.”
“Yes, yes.” Alison reached over to the desk and picked up the Post-it note.
“Thanks for this,” she said.
But Sylvia was already back at her paperwork and didn’t reply.