Litia and I had been together for 10 years, almost to the day, when she came home from work and told me she was gay. I reacted with all the clichés: the gasp, the floor falling away, the sound of the ocean in my ears. At one point, I stopped crying long enough to say, “Then I will become a woman.” She replied, “That’s not how it works.” All I said was, “Of course,” but what I thought was, Will someone please explain the goddamn rules to me?

We were living in a small town in the Kootenays in B.C., where housing was like the local caribou: plentiful in a bygone era, now alive only in rumour. Both Litia and I knew everyone in our postal code; neither of us would be able to cut ties and move into a life absent the other. It seemed easier for the person moving out to relocate entirely. Since Litia had a good job and my job was writing (is that even a job?), we decided I would go. “No rush,” she kept saying. “Live here as long as you like”—by which she meant not just our town, but our apartment.

During the day, while Litia was at work, our German shepherd sat on my lap and I’d scroll through rental listings across the country, the continent, the world. “What do we want?” I whispered to the dog, her velvet ear flickering against my lips. I made a list (Pittsburgh, Halifax, Paris) but the front-runner was Webb, Saskatchewan, a village of 71 people where my great-grandfather had homesteaded a hundred years ago. The place seemed cheap, desolate and lonely. If there wasn’t going to be fulfillment in my life, at least there’d be metaphor.

About two weeks later, Litia came home from work and told me about the two positive pregnancy tests she had taken in the staff washroom.

To keep or not to keep? We agreed to make no decision for 10 days. When we spoke, we only whispered, even though there was no reason to: “Are you done with the ice cream?” “Where are the keys?” “You still gay?”

I kept thinking about a guy I once knew who went skiing out of bounds and got swept up in an avalanche. He said the worst part about it wasn’t the avalanche, even though it broke his arm. The worst part was wandering, lost and alone, for two days in the deep solitude of the backwoods in winter.

After eight days of deliberating, Litia said she wanted to have the baby, and I didn’t object. In truth, I wanted this avalanche to keep tumbling me a while longer, because it seemed better than being alone. The days spun wildly, one into the other: we divided our assets, attended prenatal classes, assembled a crib, told everyone. One night, we invited our friends Andrew and Rosa over to break all the news. They were overjoyed at Litia’s coming out, and overjoyed again at the soon-to-be addition to our family. Later that evening, Andrew pulled me aside and said, “Dude, this is like a fucking horror movie.” Exactly, I thought. Who has time to reflect when there’s a poltergeist on the loose?

It seemed impossible for me to move out while Litia was pregnant. What if something went wrong and I wasn’t there? Or worse, what if everything went right, revealing how truly redundant I was? At night, from the spare bedroom, I would listen to her sleep. Pregnancy had given her a snore that could be described only as tectonic. The sound would grow and fade, grow and fade, then stop abruptly. I’d bolt upright. Just as panic set in, I would hear the bedsprings creak as she shifted positions. Soon returned the sound of the Earth rearranging itself.

In May of 2022, the kid was born; in August, I moved out of the apartment into a new house—with Litia and the baby. A few months later, Litia’s job relocated her to Vancouver. So we moved........

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