1 Chapter 1

1: The Problem

Leo Faraday, who was not a Leo by birth sign, and who considered himself to be as far from lion-like as one could get, was doing his best to keep an eye on the little yellow Miata to the right of him while, at the same time, trying to pull off a winning game of I-don’t-see-you. Three times Leo had granted that son-of-a-beach eye contact and the man had used every opportunity to pounce into Leo’s lane like he’d received permission to do so—only to immediately swing back into the middle lane, hopping back and forth as if any second aliens were going to open a VIP lane in the sky, and he had to make sure he was in the right lane to use it. The Miata had managed to gain zero metres of ground over any of the other cars inching along the 401 but had done an amazing job at risking everyone’s bumpers throughout the process, all the while increasing the potential of making the traffic they were already stuck in ten times worse. Leo had no idea what he would do to the man or his little yellow car if that happened.

Leo was having a terrible day. It wasn’t the worst day of his life, hadn’t even hit the top ten, but it was fair to say that if it kept getting worse in the exponential proportions that it had been, it could possibly peak at eleventh. Duration was making things harder, and only the gods knew just how long the day was going to continue. In the past twenty-five minutes, he’d travelled less than twenty kilometres. He could have walked faster. For that matter, he could have crawled faster. He would have said that traffic was being an absolute bitch, but then he would be being far nicer to traffic than it deserved. What should have been a forty-some-minute drive from the shop in Brampton to his apartment in the city was now clocking in at an hour-twenty.

Most Fridays he could deal with the fact that it took a little longer to get home. After all, he had chosen to live in the city when a lot of the people he worked with had opted for basement apartments in the suburbs. He’d chosen that option because he’d found a not-too-small apartment, on the sixth floor of a mostly okay building, that was only an Uber ride away from everything a young, single guy wanted from the weekend: pubs, clubs, live music, and the waterfront. Except he wasn’t feeling so young these days, even though he was pretty sure thirty-two wasn’t supposed to feel old, and he hadn’t seen a full weekend in months. The ones he had seen, he’d been too tired to do anything but slug-slide between the bedroom and the couch. Six-day workweeks were hard. The seven-day ones were killing him. Not being able to enjoy the city but paying extra for all the perks of living in the city was not only pointless, it was downright foolish.

He knew without a doubt that things would seem a lot less dramatic if he could just get some rest. Time off would be great, but he’d settled for a long, deep, dreamless sleep—the kind of sleep where a body was so far gone it took three or four tries to actually wake up. The very thought of it made his eyelids feel like they were ten times heavier than normal—a dangerous sensation for bumper-to-bumper traffic—but sleep hadn’t been the relief it should have been for a while now.

For nine years, Leo had lived in his apartment, and for eight years and eleven-plus months, neither sleep nor peace had been an issue. The domestic disagreements were few and far between and they had a tendency to fizzle out as quickly as they began. The kids in the building usually ran out of hooting and hollering juice by dusk, and most of the time the homeless people walking past the building preferred to mumble as oppose to scream.

His upstairs neighbour, however, was going to be the death of him.

In a move that defied both common sense and consideration, the Miata took Leo’s one-second pause to zip back into the outside lane, and it was only by the grace of all things good that Leo got to his brakes in time. He swallowed every curse his mind was throwing at him and gripped the wheel tighter than he needed to. He didn’t pound on it, or punch his dash, or make any of the gestures he so desperately wanted to. It wasn’t worth the energy he’d expend, and calm was one of those things that once one lost their grip on it, the process of gathering the reins back up became daunting. He could literally see his cut-off and the only thing he wanted to focus on was getting off the highway. From there he’d decide on the next step. As his father always said, “One step at a time will eventually be a whole journey.” That phrase had been running through his mind like a ninety’s pop song all day, but that was the case with most of the new-age, spiritually-freeing, flower-power mantras his parents shared with anyone that would listen. Once they got in your head, it was almost impossible to get them out.