McKinnon had grown up listening to police and fire scanners. Her father was a deputy fire marshal, and her mother was a nurse. From their living room, McKinnon heard about car crashes, people trapped inside of homes, or victims escaping from burning buildings, dragging themselves outside for help.
Overhearing these life-or-death intrusions into an otherwise ordinary childhood, she started out thinking she wanted to be a writer, drawn to stories of resilience in the face of trauma. “That was absolutely my dream,” she says. But in college her interests cut a new channel, and she majored in psychology.
By the time she got engaged to Baljkas, McKinnon was a PhD student studying memory and its pathways in the brain at the University of Toronto. Baljkas was a graduate student in graphic design, and they had met through McKinnon’s best friend from high school. He was logical and cool-headed. She was empathetic, probing. “It will be…
