SHORTLISTED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
On a cool April morning in East York, a demolition crew arrived at 106 Winderly Avenue, a modest redbrick house a couple blocks north of Pape and Danforth. The city had seized the property following over a year of unpaid taxes. A small development firm had purchased it at auction, intending to knock it down and build townhomes.
They expected mould. Maybe asbestos. What they found instead was a bunker. A sealed, soundproofed chamber hidden behind a false wall in the basement. And inside that bunker: two people, very much alive.
One was George Tassopoulos, a 76-year-old retired high school teacher with no next of kin and no one who had reported him missing. The other was Alison Flynn, a 33-year-old Irish woman whose disappearance had captivated two countries. She had not been seen or heard from in eighteen months.
The Lodger
Alison moved to Toronto from Galway, Ireland, in late 2017. She was 24, on a working holiday visa, wide-eyed and hopeful. She booked affordable short-term accommodation in a slightly dated but welcoming home in Greektown, where George and his wife Eleni, both retired TDSB teachers, lived quietly.
Alison stayed two months. Eleni made her soup, folded her laundry voluntarily. George talked politics and transit delays. They were kind but old-fashioned, the kind of older couple who still sent cheques to pay bills and had a 416 landline.
After Alison moved into a shared apartment near Yonge and Eglinton, the visits grew infrequent, maybe twice a year. She built a life: retail jobs on Queen West, then a junior buying role at a department store. She made a large network of friends, joined a spin class, fell in love with the city.
Somewhere along the way, the two-year working holiday visa turned into permanent residency, and then, without much fanfare, Canadian citizenship, formalised on a 45-minute Zoom call one Monday morning. She hadn’t planned to stay forever - and yet she almost did.
She shopped at Value Village and Aritzia. Frequented SpinCo on Saturday mornings. Biked to the Scarborough Bluffs on half-day Fridays. Made memories on patios. Attended overpriced birthday brunches. Watched GAA matches at Centennial Park with her fellow Irish expats. Painted watercolours in her bedroom and posted the best ones to Instagram. Tried to meal prep, but usually ended up ordering Uber Eats by Wednesday.
By 2025, she’d returned to Ireland, burnt out from North American corporate city life, but with a lot of love for her years in Toronto. Her 2026 visit was meant to be short. Nostalgic. She just wanted to walk her old routes, see some familiar faces, and quietly remind herself that she’d once built something special, half a world away.
Mira
Mira Bouchard was seventeen when she met George and Eleni in 2021. She was a high school dropout from Thorncliffe Park, moving between foster homes and transitional housing. The connection came through a local youth outreach group, one of the few still offering limited in-person support during the pandemic. Mira had recently enrolled in a GED programme and needed help catching up on math and writing.
She was sharp, guarded, and sceptical of most adults. But George helped her with fractions and sentence structure, and Eleni guided her through reading comprehension and science modules while tea brewed and something simmered on the stove. Mira often left with food wrapped in tinfoil and printouts for her next session. There was no formal arrangement. She wasn’t their foster child. But she came by regularly - sometimes to study, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to sit. She grew close enough to the couple that they gave her a spare key to their home.
When Eleni died later that year from COVID complications, not much changed. Mira continued to turn up at 106 Winderley Avenue. She stopped and started various programmes and jobs, always running her ideas by George, who edited her applications and printed off resumes when needed.
By autumn 2026, Mira was twenty-two and working part-time at a restaurant on the Danforth. On the night of Monday, September 21st, after a long shift, she left work and began walking toward Pape Station to catch the bus home.
She never made it.
She was the third victim in what would become known as the Broadview shooting spree - a senseless act of violence that left nine dead and the city in lockdown. Mira’s phone was recovered at the scene but never searched in detail. Her death was ruled tragic, but unrelated to anything larger.
No one realised that she was the missing piece in a much bigger story.
The Disappearance
Alison was meant to fly home to Dublin on Tuesday, September 22nd. Her boarding pass was downloaded. Her window seat selected.
That Monday, the day before her flight, she made an unplanned detour. It wasn’t in her itinerary. She hadn’t texted her friends. She was just popping by to say hello to George Tassopoulos - a familiar figure from her first months in the city. They hadn’t seen each other since her move back to Ireland, but she’d always promised to drop in if she ever returned. Just a quick catch-up. Then back to her Airbnb downtown to pack.
While they sat in his kitchen, the city changed.
Phones across Toronto lit up with an emergency alert: a gunman had opened fire near Withrow Park. Then again near Chester Station. CP24 shifted to rolling coverage. Sirens echoed along the Danforth. Toronto Police urged all residents to shelter in place as a citywide manhunt unfolded across the east end.
It was one of those surreal, city-defining days - the kind people would later talk about in terms of where they were, who they were with, how close they lived to the danger. The Broadview shooting spree would ultimately claim nine lives. For a brief window, Toronto was a locked-down city.
George, already prone to worst-case scenarios, didn’t hesitate. He suggested they wait it out in the shelter - just overnight. Alison knew about the bunker from her short stay in 2017, when George had once pointed to the hatch and mumbled something about being prepared. Back then, she’d laughed and forgotten about it. But now, under the sudden pressure of a city in panic, it felt like the sensible choice.
The shelter wasn’t a recent creation. It had been built in the early 1970s by George’s father, a Greek immigrant who’d lived through war, fled a military regime, and believed another global crisis was inevitable. Officially, it was a Cold War fallout bunker: a sealed concrete room beneath the house, with a reinforced steel hatch, a hand-crank air vent, shelves for food and water, and a chemical toilet curtained off in the corner.
Most families let those kinds of spaces rot. George didn’t. He maintained it quietly over the years: replacing batteries, checking locks, stocking tins and bottled water. After Eleni died, his anxiety deepened. He installed a secondary lock on the outside hatch - meant to keep looters out, he once told Alison - but it also meant that once the door was closed, it couldn’t be opened from within.
A relic from another time, kept intact by a man who never fully trusted the present — and, eventually, couldn’t escape the past.
They climbed down with sleeping bags and snacks. “Just for the night,” George said. “Mira’s coming tomorrow. She has a key. I’ll text her and tell her to open it tomorrow.”
There was no Wi-Fi in the bunker. No cell service. The hatch could only be opened from the outside.
And no one else knew Alison Flynn was there.
The Search
When Alison failed to arrive in Dublin, her family in Ireland reached out to her Toronto friends. Her friends had assumed she flew back as scheduled. She’d been quiet, but not alarmingly so. When it became clear she had never boarded the flight, panic set in.
Within 48 hours, her family filed a missing person’s report.
The Irish media exploded.
“Irish Woman Disappears in Toronto Before Return Flight”
“Alison Flynn Missing: ‘She Never Just Vanishes,’ Says Family”
“Desperate Search Underway for Irish Woman in Toronto”
A photo of Alison, smiling under a neon sign at a Queen West bar just days earlier, became a banner image. True crime podcasts speculated about sex trafficking, random violence, cults.
No one mentioned George.
Eighteen Months Below
The bunker was small. Eight feet wide, twelve feet long. Shelves of canned goods, pasta, water, a treadmill, a transistor radio.
George had built it to wait out a crisis. He hadn’t planned for silence.
At first, Alison tried to count the days - tally marks in pencil along the concrete wall. But she lost track after thirty-six. The food was bland, the air stale, her sleep fractured.
George rationed everything with quiet precision. He boiled water, adjusted the dehumidifier, logged everything in a notebook. For a time, Alison rebelled - refusing meals, screaming into a pillow, scratching at the hatch door until her nails split.
Then she stopped. They fell into rhythm. At night, George read aloud from old paperbacks. Alison imagined herself somewhere else - a bookstore in Galway, a wedding in the Algarve, a grocery aisle where nothing was running out.
Weeks passed. Then months. She stopped expecting to be found.
The Discovery
In early 2028, the City of Toronto auctioned George’s house after over a year of unpaid taxes. No family had come forward. The property was classified as derelict and sold to a development firm.
On the second day of demolition, a contractor swung a sledgehammer into a false wall and found cold steel behind it. A hatch.
The Aftermath
Alison was malnourished, but stable. She flew home within the month. George was arrested but released after psychiatric evaluation. He was deemed paranoid, but not malicious.
Alison declined to testify. In a written statement, she said:
“George made a terrible mistake. But he was never trying to hurt me. I believe he thought he was keeping me safe.”
Mira’s death was reclassified. Police recovered George’s final text to her: “Going into the bunker overnight. Let yourself in and open the latch tomorrow like I showed you. Stay safe.”
The message was timestamped. It had been marked “read.”
What Was Missed
When Alison didn’t arrive in Dublin, her family assumed a delay. Then a mix-up. Then something worse. Calls were made. Friends in Toronto were contacted. A missing persons report was filed.
But no one thought to check George Tassopoulos’s house. Her friends hadn’t known she was visiting him. The police believed she had disappeared somewhere downtown. And George, a reclusive widower with no employer, no visitors, and no next of kin, simply faded from view.
Mira Bouchard was the only person who knew where they were. But no one connected her death to Alison’s disappearance. One woman was deeply missed. The other, quietly buried. And the man who tied them both together, without meaning to, waited underground for someone who would never come.
Eighteen months later, during routine demolition ahead of a housing development, city workers found the sealed hatch beneath the old Tassopoulos house.
Alison quietly returned to Ireland. There was no press conference. No televised reunion. Just home - and the long, slow work of rebuilding something like a normal life. In Galway, she lives with her parents again. She paints sometimes. She walks a lot.
George was placed under psychiatric supervision. He never faced criminal charges. Most agreed: he had retreated into a world no one else believed in. And when it closed around him, he simply stayed there.
Aisling Owens is a hobbyist writer from Roscommon. She spent seven years in Toronto, a city that continues to shape her stories.