My Whitby Place Corner

I was sitting at the kitchen table, a mug gone lukewarm, three contractor quotes spread like evidence in front of me, when the drywall dust from the next-door reno settled on my notes and I finally felt it — the fog lifting. One quote said forty thousand dollars, another eighty, the last one one hundred and ten. The kitchen still had its original 1990s oak cabinets and a yellowed microwave hood that hummed like an old refrigerator. Outside, a cold rain came in off the 410 a

I was hunched over the kitchen table with three quotes spread out like sad paper islands, coffee gone cold, and a smear of dust on the edge of my phone where the demolition crew had left their fingerprints last week. It was a Tuesday in Brampton, rain on and off, and the quote numbers were doing that thing numbers do when you stop understanding them: $40,000, $68,500, $110,000. Same square footage, same job description if you squinted. Different languages if you read the fi