Priya, 38.

It's 6:42 a.m. Priya is half-awake on the edge of the bed when her phone lights up. An email from Service Canada, subject line in clipped bureaucratic English: "Notice regarding your Canada Pension Plan account."

Her contributions are frozen, pending the transfer of her file to the new Alberta Pension Plan. No money is missing. Nothing is being taken away. It's just — paused. For how long, the email doesn't say.

Downstairs, the kettle. The CBC is on, low. The Alberta dollar opened at 0.82 against the U.S. dollar, the announcer says, in the same voice she'd use for the weather. Gas in Calgary is up eleven cents overnight.

At the hospital, Marisol from triage is crying in the staff room. She's a permanent resident — her status is federal. Nobody can tell her what an Alberta passport, or an Alberta PR card, will mean for her this winter.

Priya's sister lives in Kelowna. They had a plan: if Priya ever wanted out of the night shift, she'd move west and pick up agency work. Her nursing license is from the College of Registered Nurses of Alberta. Whether B.C. still mutually recognizes it is — and here is that word again — pending.

At 7:14 a.m. a Code Blue goes off in Bay 4. For eleven minutes nothing else in the world exists. The patient survives. Priya washes her hands for a long time afterward and thinks about nothing in particular.

On her break she opens her banking app. Her mortgage is with a Toronto-based bank. Her chequing is fine. Her RRSP holds a U.S. index fund whose value, in whatever currency she's now paid in, she genuinely cannot calculate.

She drives home at 8 a.m. into a sunrise that looks exactly like every other October sunrise she's ever seen. Nothing visible has changed. Almost nothing.