Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
MARA
Three days after Mango almost died, I text the stranger again.
Not because I need veterinary advice. Mango is fine. Mango is currently sprawled across Chioma's couch wearing a cone of shame, licking peanut butter off a Kong toy while my best friend hand feeds him treats she ordered from an organic pet bakery in Leslieville.
No, I text the stranger because it's 11:47pm on a Friday, my mother just called me a disappointment for the third time this month, and every person in my contacts list would try to fix it.
Random question for the wildlife vet in British Columbia. Do animals hold grudges? Like if a cow stepped on your foot, would she remember doing it the next day and feel bad?
Stupid. So stupid. My thumb hesitates over the send button for about two seconds before I press it anyway, because what's the worst that can happen?
He ignores me. He tells me to stop texting him.
Both of those outcomes are fine. Both of those outcomes are what a normal person would do when a stranger from Toronto keeps bothering them about livestock psychology at midnight.
The reply comes in four minutes.
Cows don't feel guilt. They do hold grudges. I have a client's Hereford who's hated me since 2019 because I gave her a vaccination in the rain.
A laugh escapes. Actual sound, in my actual apartment, at midnight, sitting on the floor of my converted garage studio surrounded by cooling racks of beeswax votives that smell like bergamot.
The candle order is for a boutique in Kensington Market, forty units due Monday, and my hands are stiff from ten hours of pouring.
So cows are petty. Good to know. Follow up question. What's a Hereford?
It's a breed of cattle. Red and white. Built like a tank with the temperament of a moody teenager.
That's my mother.
Three dots. Then nothing. Then three dots again.
Is your mother a cow?
My mother is a retired pediatric surgeon who spent thirty years saving children's lives, raised three daughters on her own after my dad passed, put all of us through university, and considers anything less than a medical degree a personal insult to the family legacy. So. Adjacent.
Silence. Long enough that I think I've scared him off with too much honesty too fast, which is exactly what Chioma says is my problem with men, with dating apps, with that one disastrous speed dating event at a wine bar on King West where I told a chartered accountant named Derek about my father's death within six minutes of sitting down.
But then.
What did you study?
Chemical engineering. Two years. Hated every molecule of it. Dropped out to make candles. My mother has not recovered.
You make candles.
Artisan candles and apothecary products. Small batch. Hand poured. Beeswax and botanical scents. My company is called Marrow and Light.
That's a good name.
Something warm spreads through my ribs. Four words from a man whose name I don't know.
Whose face I've never seen. Who, for all I know, could be a seventy year old retired trucker catfishing me from a basement in Kamloops.
But his texts are short, blunt, occasionally so rude I have to read them twice.
No emojis. No exclamation marks. No filler.
Thank you. What's your name?
Holden.
I'm Mara. Short for Imara. It means "strong" in Swahili, which is ironic because I just ate an entire sleeve of Digestive biscuits while sitting on my garage floor crying about my mother.
That sounds strong to me. Most people cry without biscuits.
The laugh is louder this time. Fuller. My neighbor's cat, who sits on the fence between our yards judging me through the window every night, startles and disappears.
Holden. Thank you for saving Mango. And for answering a stranger's weird cow questions at midnight.
Go to sleep, Mara.
So I do.
Except I don't, really. Sleep has been a negotiation for months.
Maybe years. The bed in my apartment above my parents' garage, the apartment they let me convert when I moved back after breaking off my engagement to Tunde, is comfortable enough.
Clean sheets. Good mattress. Weighted blanket Chioma bought me last Christmas.
But my brain doesn't shut off. Hasn't since I gave Tunde back his ring, moved out of our Yorkville condo, watched my mother's face collapse in real time.
Two years ago. Two years, and my mother still introduces me to people as "Imara, who was engaged to Dr. Oladipo, you remember him, wonderful family."
The engagement lasted fourteen months. Tunde is a good man.
Genuinely good. Cardiology fellow at Sunnybrook, tall, speaks Yoruba to his grandmother on the phone every Sunday, remembers anniversaries.
My mother loved him. His mother loved me.
Our families fit together so cleanly it was almost architectural, two Nigerian families in Scarborough whose children were doing everything right.
Except I wasn't doing anything. I was disappearing.
Shrinking into the shape Tunde needed, the shape my mother approved of, the shape that made everyone else comfortable.
Planning a wedding I didn't want in a church I didn't attend for a life that looked perfect from every angle except the one where I was standing.
Chioma was the one who said it. Sitting in her car outside the bridal shop on Bloor, watching me cry into a garment bag. "Mara. Do you even want to marry this man?"
And the answer, the honest answer, the one I couldn't say to my mother or his mother or anyone at any of the three engagement parties they threw, was I don't know who I want because I don't know who I am.
So I gave back the ring. Moved into the garage. Started Marrow & Light with six hundred dollars, a second-hand pouring pot, and the YouTube education of a woman with absolutely nothing left to lose.
Two years later, my candles are in four Toronto boutiques. Revenue is growing. Slowly, but growing. My mother refers to it as "Imara's little project" in the same tone she'd use to describe a child's finger painting on the refrigerator.
This is the life I chose. This converted garage with its pouring station, its drying racks, its shelves of essential oils organized by note profile. The life where nobody asks me what I want because nobody believes this is an answer.
A week passes before I text Holden again.
Do you ever treat anything cute? Like a baby deer? Or is it all moody cows and large things with hooves?
Twenty minutes.
I treated an eagle last month. Broken wing. Hit a power line outside Kaslo.
Did it make it??
She's at a rehab center in Creston. Should fly again by September.
That's beautiful.
It was a lot of blood and a bird trying to take my eye out with her beak. But sure. Beautiful.
You're very grumpy for someone who saves eagles.
I've been told.
The rhythm establishes itself without either of us naming it. A text every few days becomes every other day becomes nightly. Always late. Always after the rest of my life has gone quiet and the only sound is wax cooling on the racks.
He tells me about a horse with colic. A rancher's dog who ate a porcupine, quills and all. A black bear cub he relocated from someone's crawl space while the homeowner screamed from the truck.
You just... picked up a bear cub?
It was small.
Holden. It was a BEAR.
A small bear.
Three weeks in, I tell him about the engagement. Not the whole thing. Just the edges. Just enough.
I was engaged. Broke it off. My family thinks I ruined my life. Most days I think they might be right.
The reply takes longer than usual.
They're wrong.
No explanation. No follow up questions. No attempt to therapize me or offer five steps to healing or suggest I try journaling. Just: they're wrong. Two words. A closed door against every voice telling me I made the biggest mistake of my life.
At week four, I catch myself checking my phone before I check my email. Before I check my orders. Before I do anything.
At week five, Chioma finds me smiling at my screen during brunch and nearly chokes on her mimosa.
"Who is that? That's not a candle supplier face. That is a man face."
"He's nobody. He's a vet."
"In Toronto?"
"In British Columbia."
The look she gives me could strip paint. "Mara Adekunle. You are texting a man 5 thousand kilometers away that you've never seen?"
"He saved Mango."
"Mango is my dog. And that doesn't explain the face."
At six weeks, my mother calls.
"Tunde's sister's wedding is in August. She invited you. Because she still considers you family, even if you don't consider yourself part of anything."
The words land exactly where they're aimed. Center mass. Twenty years of surgical precision applied to her youngest daughter's most tender spots.
After we hang up, I sit on the garage floor. Cooling racks around me. Bergamot in my lungs. Phone in my hand.
My mother just called me a disappointment for the fourth time this month. I think she keeps a calendar.
Midnight. A Tuesday. Holden will be asleep.
Holden gets up at 5am to check on livestock and doesn't own a coffee maker that works properly.
He's told me this. We've talked about coffee.
About mornings. About the sound the mountains make when the wind shifts.
About nothing and everything and all the spaces in between.
The reply comes in ninety seconds.
She's wrong about you.
You don't know me.
I know what you type at midnight. That's the truest version of anyone.
My eyes burn. The candles around me blur into warm gold shapes. The garage feels too small. Toronto feels too small. Everything I've built in this careful, contained, mother approved life feels like a shell I've been crouching inside, waiting for permission to stand up.
Holden?
Yeah.
Thank you for always texting back.
Go to sleep, Mara.
This time, I do.