I woke up that morning with the particular excitement that only exists in childhood — the kind that fills your whole body before you even understand what it means. It was my birthday. Something was supposed to happen.

I went outside. My dad was working in the front flowerbed of our house. I can still picture the scene clearly: the dirt, the flowers, the quiet of a Saskatchewan morning. I stood there for a moment, watching him work. I was waiting for him to say happy birthday.

He didn't. He just kept working.

Our family was part of the Jehovah's Witness faith, which meant birthdays weren't celebrated the way they were for most other families. I didn't understand any of that at the time. I was four years old. You don't understand religious doctrine at four. You only understand feelings.

The feeling I remember from that moment — quiet, not dramatic, no tears — was disappointment. The particular kind that comes from expecting something and realizing, slowly, that it isn't coming. That the world doesn't quite work the way you thought it did.

It was such a small moment. And it stayed with me for forty years.

That's the thing about early memories. It's rarely the big dramatic events that lodge themselves in us. It's the subtle ones — the quiet ones — the ones that begin to teach us what to expect from the people we need most.

That morning in the flowerbed was my first lesson.

There is one other memory I have from those Saskatoon years that I hold onto — a massive rainstorm that transformed the city overnight, streets flooded so badly people were moving through the neighbourhood in canoes. For a small child it was surreal, almost magical, like the whole world had changed its rules without warning.

Those two moments — the birthday in the flowerbed and the flooded streets — are the edges of what I can reach from those earliest years. And then everything changed.

When my mother left my father, I was about five years old. My brother Jason was ten. My mother moved the three of us into an apartment. She didn't leave with much. By any measure, it was a hard time.

But I want to be honest about something, because it would be easy to make this story darker than it was from the beginning, and that wouldn't be true. Those years — roughly 1983 to 1987, between my parents' separation and the arrival of the man who would change everything — were not without difficulty. But they were not without goodness either. They were, in many ways, the happiest years of my childhood.

Every summer, my mother took us camping. We'd drive up to a lake in northern Saskatchewan, the kind of place where the water is cold and clear and the evenings smell like pine and fire smoke. We didn't have proper gear at first — we were starting from nothing. But we figured it out. That was my mother in those years: figuring it out, making things work, showing up.

I learned to windsurf at that lake. I remember sitting in front of the fire at night, watching the flames, eating marshmallows, listening to the sounds of the water. She was present. Happy, even. Whatever was difficult about the rest of the year seemed to stay behind in the city while we were up there.

The drinking was always there in some form. But in those early years it hadn't yet taken over. She could still be fully there. And when she was fully there, she was fun. She was alive. She was someone you wanted to be around.

I held onto those summers for a long time. Long after the camping trips stopped feeling good. Long after a lot of things stopped feeling good.

We had a grandmother who was a constant in those years. She taught me how to play crib. She didn't go easy on me — if she could beat me, she beat me — and I'm grateful for that. Some of the best things I learned came from people who refused to let me win.

My brother Jason was five years older than me, which meant he was ten when our parents separated. In the years that followed, he was, in ways neither of us fully understood at the time, becoming a parent. My mother worked. My mother went out. And when she wasn't there — which was often enough — Jason was. He made sure we ate. He got me ready in the morning. He kept things together in the quiet, unremarkable way that children do when they're asked to carry things children shouldn't have to carry.

I missed my dad in those years. That was the thing I couldn't quite put into words but felt constantly — his absence as a kind of weather, something in the air that wasn't right. We got to see him every few weekends when he wasn't working shifts at the potash mine, and I remember counting down the days each time. He was quiet, not particularly warm, not a man who showed what he was feeling. But he was my dad, and I loved him, and I wanted him there.

Then sometime in the fall of 1986, or possibly early 1987 — I was eight years old — my mother met a man named Blake.

And the early happy days ended.

I don't know where my mother met Blake. A bar, maybe. He was the kind of man who was built for bars — big, loud in the best way, the kind of person who walked into a room and made it feel like the party had finally arrived.

He was an auctioneer. Over six feet tall, heavyset, with the kind of physical presence that fills a doorway. And he had what my mother always responded to in a person: the gift of the gab. He could talk. He could charm. He could make you feel, in the first ten minutes of meeting him, like you were the most interesting person he'd spoken to all week.

Everybody loved Blake.

That's important to understand. It's easy, knowing what I know now, to look back and see him as the villain from the beginning. But that's not how it was. He drank, yes. But in those early days it didn't seem like anything more than the kind of drinking that a lot of people did. He seemed like a nice guy. He seemed to genuinely like us, or at least he seemed to make an effort, which was more than nothing.

My mother had been alone for four years by the time Blake arrived. She'd earned some happiness. I think, at eight years old, I was willing to let her have it.

They dated for most of a year, and then, in the summer of 1987, we moved in with him. And honestly? That summer wasn't bad. There was a lightness to those months that I associate with possibility — that feeling of something about to begin rather than something about to end.

I didn't know, of course. You never do.

The decision to move to Regina came quickly. Blake's auction business in Saskatoon was closing down, and the main operation was based in Regina. That was that. It wasn't made in consultation with Jason or me — but it was the first time I felt clearly that my mother had chosen Blake over us. Not maliciously. Not even consciously, I think. But the feeling was there, and it was real, and I carried it for a long time.

We were leaving Saskatoon. We were leaving our grandmother. We were leaving the lake where I'd learned to windsurf. We were leaving my father, who would now be two and a half hours away by bus — a distance that, at nine years old, might as well have been the other side of the world.

I was nine years old, and I was starting over again.

Meeting Blake wasn't the disaster. Not at first. He seemed charming. He treated my mother well enough in the beginning. There was a summer that felt, if not perfect, then at least possible. The story of Blake is not the story of a monster who arrived fully formed. It's the story of something that looked like hope and turned into something else. And that distinction matters — because it's the reason nobody saw it coming.

When damage comes wearing the face of possibility, you don't recognize it until you're already inside it.

By the time I understood what Blake actually was, we'd been in Regina for years. And by then, a lot of things had already happened that couldn't be undone.

We landed in the southeast end of Regina in late August and I started school within a week of arriving. Our first real impression of the city came within the first few days. Jason and I had walked to a nearby mall — just to look around — and we were cutting back through a long open field on the way home when a group of teenage boys spotted us. Three or four of them, the kind who were looking for something to do and found us instead.

One of them claimed to know Jason. Said Jason had done something to his girlfriend. I don't think it mattered to them whether it was true.

They grabbed us. Jason told me to run.

I froze.

I don't know how else to say it. My legs simply did not work. I stood there, held by one of them, struggling uselessly, watching while another one picked up a two-by-four from the ground and swung it at my brother's head. Jason went down. They laughed. And then eventually they left, and Jason got up, and we ran home.

When we told our mother what happened, she asked why we hadn't fought back.

Jason was fourteen years old with a head wound and his mother wanted to know why he hadn't fought back. I don't think she meant to be cruel. I think she didn't know what else to say. But I watched my brother's face in that moment and I understood that he was carrying something he wasn't going to talk about.

I was nine years old. I had frozen while my brother was hurt. And now I was going to have to walk into a school where I didn't know a single person, in a city that had introduced itself to us with a two-by-four, and try to make it work.

That's basically what the rest of my life in Regina was like, too. Just scared. Trying to make it work while being basically just scared.

Fight or flight. It was a feeling I'd carry in my body for the next thirty years.

I was quite good at school in Saskatoon. I liked it. I felt like myself there.

Regina took that from me in about three weeks.