Chapter 17I hadn’t come back here, to my old street, since leaving for Vancouver at age seventeen. But there it was, the brown-brick building where I’d grown up. Had it always been this unassuming? That couldn’t be the same front yard where Lene and Boone had spent days building snow forts. The crooked balcony with the rusted wrought-iron railing couldn’t be the same balcony where I’d stood and smoked my cigarettes in secret, waiting for Davie to roll around the corner so we could take off for a ride through the city.
I looked at O’Reilly, who was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. He was staring out of the window at the modest building where we’d both lived as kids. But his childhood had been nothing like mine. His had been full of loneliness and abandonment. And now, the one perso
