She peered into the shop windows, trying to distract herself, but it was a chilly night and she felt intimidated by the warm glow of interiors and the orange light spilling out of bus windows as she trudged past the transit station. Nights like this had always seemed comfortless to her. You could smell winter gathering like an army just over the horizon. Nights like this, her thoughts ran in odd directions.

She thought about Roch, although she didn’t want to.

She thought about Benjamin.

Impossible to imagine the two of them together. They were so different … although (and here was the only similarity) each of them seemed to Amelie endlessly mysterious.

Roch should not have been a mystery. Roch, after all, was her brother. They shared family … if you could call it family, an absentee father and a mother who was arrested for shoplifting with such startling regularity that she had been banned from Eaton’s, Simpson’s, and Ogilvy’s. Sometimes Amelie felt as if she had been raised by a Social Welfare caseworker. She’d been fostered out twice. But the thing was, you learned to adapt.

Roch, her little brother, never did. They grew up in a rough part of Montreal and went to the kind of Catholic school where the nuns carried wooden rulers with metal edges embedded in them—in certain hands, a deadly weapon. The nuns were big on geometry and devotions. Amelie, however, had had her own agenda. In an era when the Parti Quebecois was dismantling English from the official culture, Amelie had resolved to teach herself the language. Not just the debased English everybody knew; not just the English you needed to follow a few American TV shows.Real English. She had conceived of a destiny outside Montreal. She saw herself living in English Canada, maybe eventually the States. Doing something glamorous—she wasn’t sure what. Maybe it would involve show business. Maybe she would manage a famous rock band.