My October Read Online Free PDF Page B

head.
    Gagnon chuckled as though he’d just been clever. “Whoever she is, you must keep her.”
    He reduced the rent by ten percent, and Luc wrote him a cheque to cover the first month. After Monsieur Gagnon had reinserted himself into his Cavalier and driven off, Luc had the inspiration to give Marie-Soleil a victory kiss. They were standing together on the sidewalk outside the house. He felt happy, more vigorous than he’d felt in years. Marie-Soleil had put on her sunglasses. He leaned in, aiming for a cheek, but she turned unexpectedly and their noses collided. Luc pulled back, but Marie-Soleil didn’t. She was a head shorter than he was and had to stand on her toes to reach him. And reach him she did, planting two moist, dark plums on his mouth.
    Something chirped.
    â€œSorry, sorry,” she said, pulling out her cell phone. She pressed a button and held it close to her face. “ Allô? … Yes, yes,” she said. “He’s right here.” She pulled out a notepad and scribbled something.
    The street was deserted. Luc was glad no one was around to notice his semi-hard-on. In twenty years, the only woman who had kissed him like that was Hannah, and it had been a while.
    â€œFrédéric,” Marie-Soleil said, snapping her phone shut.
    The semi-hard-on vanished.
    â€œApparently, someone has been calling the office all morning trying to reach you. It’s urgent.” She looked down at the notepad. “Serge Vien,” she said. “Mean anything to you?”

3
    H annah stepped back to avoid the spray. She was standing on a patch of soggy grass across the street from Sunnybrook Hospital. Beads of water shimmered like sequins on the sleeves of her suede jacket. The hems of her jeans were spattered with mud. She had just emerged from the ravine, damp with rain and her own sweat, but pleased. It had worked.
    She’d walked here from her parents’ home in the posh neighbourhood of Lawrence Park in just over an hour.
    It was October 2, a warm, wet, windless day, her fifth in Toronto. The path through the ravine had started off as dirt, which the rain was turning into mud. As Hannah walked south, the surface had changed occasionally to gravel or asphalt, with patches reverting to dirt. The last bit had been an intricate system of boardwalks constructed over a marshy tract called Sherwood Park, a lovely and unexpected artery of green running through the bituminous heart of Toronto. Just now, she had spotted a pair of pheasants. She had also seen cardinals, a woodpecker, flocks of chickadees, and everywhere Toronto’splump black squirrels, less rat-like, somehow, than their thin grey cousins in Montreal.
    The walk had been calming. For a time, Hannah had forgotten her troubles, the most pressing of which was her father, who was waiting for her in the narrow white hospital room where she had left him the previous evening. She had also managed to forget her mother, Connie, who was probably sitting in the visitor’s chair beside him, reading the newspaper, making comments about Hannah’s lack of punctuality and general level of inefficacy compared to Benjamin, their super-organized son, who had flown in to help them the week before. And then there was Luc, back in Montreal, with whom she barely spoke anymore. She wasn’t sure what was happening, but for months, now, they’d been in some kind of trouble. And, of course, there was Hugo.
    For much of the walk, she had been alone. At one point, she’d spotted a man with a schnauzer some distance away on the path, but as soon as his dog urinated, he had scuttled back to street level. He’d looked vaguely afraid, as though the ravine might swallow him and his little pet whole.
    A breach opened suddenly in the traffic on Bayview Avenue. Hannah steeled herself and stepped into it.
    SUNNYBROOK HOSPITAL was a small city of newly built and renovated beige pavilions, some squat, some several storeys