Eventually, she found her footing. She moved into a duplex with a friend and began working as an aide in a group home for adults with disabilities. She enrolled in school to learn massage therapy. Many days, she’d run to class just off the graveyard shift, bleary-eyed and still wearing scrubs. At the end of 2016, Watt graduated and became a registered massage therapist. She established her own practice, where many of her clients are people suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her business had been steadily building for about six months when she decided in June 2017 to treat herself to a new tattoo—a sprawling rainbow dragon on her right thigh that took multiple five-hour sessions to complete. When it was done, she went to a pub where her friend was a bartender. Watt’s skin throbbed under the bandage as she chomped on a sandwich and fries. On the way out, the friend made a suggestion, almost out of the blue.
“Oh, you should meet my friend Pete.” She showed Watt a photo of the guy. Pete Dimov was balding a little on top. He had a blond beard and eyes that bugged—Watt thought he looked like “a sexy Steve Buscemi.” “He has a weird sense of humor, just like you,” said the friend. “He really likes pandas.” Watt laughed when she saw a photo of a cheeseburger tattoo on his butt.
After she got home, Watt texted her friend a photo of a painting she’d made. It showed two pandas, one baring its teeth, the other slumped and looking sad. “Hey, show this to Pete,” she wrote. A few days later, he DMed her on Instagram. “Our mutual pal showed me your panda painting and I must say, it’s most impressive!” he wrote. “I’m a big fan of the panda.”
“Hahaha oh my god,” Watt responded. “I was kind of joking when I told her to show you but thanks.” When Dimov asked her out for a drink, Watt hesitated at first, but she agreed to go.
Dimov picked her up in a beat-up beige Lincoln. Watt wore cuffed skinny jeans, a black T-shirt, and a backward ball cap. Over beers, he made self-deprecating jokes, and they bantered and giggled for hours in a booth at the back of the sports bar.
The next morning he messaged her: “Meeting you was totally awesome … Let’s do it again sometime.”
Dimov, born in Toronto, was raised in the small, formerly industrial town of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. His parents split up soon after his birth, and when he was 7, Dimov and his mother moved to France, where his stepfather worked for a tire plant. As an adult, he has lived an itinerant life. He briefly attended Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, baked croissants in Ottawa, and played bass in various heavy metal bands in Western Canada. He doted on all of his friends, and this was especially true of Watt. She liked his boyishness and quick wit and decided to give their relationship a shot.
