Dale Hutchins woke before the alarm, the way he had for most of the past year, and lay in the dark doing the math he had already done a hundred times. The renewal letter from ATB sat on the kitchen counter downstairs. He had read it twice and then stopped reading it, the way you stop pressing on a tooth that has started to hurt.
He made coffee in the quiet. The house was too quiet now. Madison's room at the end of the hall had been empty for fourteen months, ever since she took the job in Toronto, and her mother had moved to be near her not long after. Dale told people it was temporary. He had stopped believing it himself around Christmas.
The radio came on with the news, the same news in a different order. The transit talks with British Columbia had stalled again. A spokesman used the word "tariff" three times in one sentence, which was new. A year ago they had called it a transit fee. Before that they had not called it anything, because back when Alberta was still part of Canada, moving its oil to a port had simply been a thing the country did. Now it was an international negotiation, and Alberta was the smaller party at the table, holding a product it could not ship without somebody else's permission and somebody else's price.
He drove downtown out of habit more than need. The tower where he had worked for eleven years still had the company name on it, but the top fifteen floors were dark. The head office had gone to Vancouver in the second wave, after the bank and before the pipeline operator. They had offered Dale a transfer. They had not offered to move his life, his mortgage, or the value of a house that was now worth less than what he owed on it. He had said no, and they had wished him well, and that was that. Half the brass plaques in the downtown core belonged to companies that now made their real decisions in cities a time zone away. What stayed in Calgary was the field work and the field wages. What left was everything that had made the field work worth doing.
He parked and did not get out. On the passenger seat was the weekend paper, folded to a column he kept meaning to throw away. It was about Britain, of all places, about a vote they had taken back in 2016. Some economists had run the numbers all the way out, and the paper quoted them plainly. Leaving had cost the country between six and eight percent of its output per person across the following decade. Even the cautious government forecaster, the one the Leave side had spent years calling a pessimist, held to a four percent hit to the economy's productivity. Investment had fallen too, the article said, by somewhere between twelve and eighteen percent.
Dale had done that math the way he did all his math now, quietly and against his will. Alberta's output per person had been around seventy-one thousand dollars the year before the vote. Take the smaller number, the optimistic one, and it came to nearly three thousand dollars a person, a year, gone. Take the larger one and it was closer to five or six. For a family it ran into the tens of thousands. Nobody had ever sent him an invoice for it. It had arrived instead as the raise that did not come, the hours that got trimmed, the customers who moved their accounts to Saskatoon. It had arrived as a daughter in Toronto and a wife who followed her, and a million other people doing the same arithmetic and reaching the same exit.
That was the part the rallies had never mentioned. A million gone, and when a million people leave, a housing market does not soften. It falls through the floor. Dale's house, the one he had bought when this was all still a country, was worth a fraction of the number on his renewal letter. And the letter was the trap inside the trap. The mortgage had to be renewed whether the market had crashed or not, and renewing into a crash meant the rates were ugly and the approvals were uglier. The big national banks that might once have worked with him had moved their decision-making out of the province along with everything else. What was left was ATB, one provincial lender holding up a market that the rest of the country's banks had quietly written off as a place not worth lending into. The letter was not really an offer. It was a notice.
He should have been angry at the bank. He found he could not manage it. The bank was just the messenger standing closest to him.
His phone buzzed. A neighbour, sending around a clip from a speech the night before. Dale almost did not watch it, then did. The premier stood at a podium in front of the new flag, the one that still did not look right to him, and explained that the hard times were temporary, that the chill on investment was the fault of hostile forces, that the suffering of ordinary Albertans could be laid at the feet of Trudeau, and Carney, and the bankers in cities Alberta had chosen to leave. The crowd cheered. Dale noticed the crowd was smaller than it used to be. The people who had left did not cheer at rallies. They cheered, if they cheered at all, in Toronto and Vancouver, where the offices were and the jobs were and the dollar still meant what it had always meant.
There was a newer line in the speech, near the end, and Dale rewound to hear it twice. The premier had talked about a "framework for closer association" with the Americans. The words were careful and they were soft, and Dale understood them for what they were. A small place, landlocked, with a product it could not move and a population it could not keep, does not stay free for very long. It drifts toward the nearest large thing, and the nearest large thing was to the south, and it did not offer partnership. It offered absorption, on its own terms, to a province that had left one capital convinced it would gain a voice and was now learning what it felt like to have even less of one. Independence, it turned out, had been the station, not the destination.
Dale put the phone face down on the paper, over the column about Britain. He sat in the parked car outside the half-dark tower for a while longer. Then he picked up the renewal letter he had brought along without deciding to, and he read it a third time, all the way through, because there was no version of the morning where not reading it made the number any smaller.
The vote had asked him whether he wanted to be free. It had not asked him what freedom cost, or who would be left to pay it, or how long the bill would run. He had the answers to all three now. He folded the letter, and he went to keep his appointment.