All The Time
In The World

What it costs to love someone completely. And to be loved more completely than you can bear.

At ROMAN FLYNNE's funeral, CALLUM heard him reduced to two familiar phrases: family friend and lifelong mentor.

Neither came close to the truth.

But CALLUM did not know that yet.

While going through what ROMAN left behind, he found a USB drive containing something ROMAN had paid a digital legacy service to build for him: his life, reconstructed from journals, photographs, recordings and correspondence into something resembling a story.

When CALLUM opened it, he found his mother, ELIZABETH.

The story began in Ottawa in 1988.

ROMAN was at a house party when he met her. She was twenty-four and he tried his luck.

She turned him down.

To ROMAN, she was still just a woman at a party in a city he did not expect to stay in.

To CALLUM, she was his mother at an age he had never known her, being noticed by a man whose place in her life he thought he understood.

And this was only page eleven.

What followed stretched across decades.

ROMAN and ELIZABETH found each other again in Toronto. What began there became the relationship neither of them ever quite succeeded in putting behind them.

They fell in love. They lost each other. They built lives that sometimes included the other and sometimes did not. Years passed. Other people mattered. Then they didn't.

Circumstances changed.

ROMAN and ELIZABETH changed with them.

They got older. Loving each other did not get any simpler.

Their lives kept widening beyond their love. The friends around them grew older alongside them, carrying forward old jokes, old mistakes and increasingly complicated histories of their own. Moments CALLUM knew as family stories appeared here while they were still happening, before anyone knew which parts would be remembered and which would be left out.

Some he recognized from childhood.

Others changed what he thought he remembered.

And CALLUM kept reading.

He encountered people he had known all his life before they became the versions he knew: uncertain, impulsive, occasionally selfish, often trying their best without knowing whether it would be enough. Stories CALLUM grew up with began somewhere else. Choices he had never questioned acquired reasons. Absences he had accepted started to require explanations.

Most of all, ROMAN changed.

The family friend. The lifelong mentor. The man who had simply been there.

With every chapter, those descriptions became less adequate.

By the end, CALLUM understood why ROMAN had been there for so much of his childhood.

He also understood why he had never quite been allowed to belong to it.