Rikke turned away. Hung on the foyer wall by a steel wire was a mirror, framed in heavy brass, laden with dust. She caught a glimpse of her dark reflection, and her breath clutched in her chest, because it was her mother’s face staring back at her like a mean-eyed ghost brought up from the earth. Fate was cruel. Thirty years had passed, and she had become the person that she and Finn had hated for so long. You can run and run, and when you think you’ve escaped, you realize that all along you’ve been running in a circle.

She switched off the downstairs light and felt her way with her hands, like a blind person, toward the mahogany steps that led upstairs. At the top of the stairs, she stared at the closed door in front of her. Finn’s room. She jiggled the metal knob, but it was locked. He always kept it locked. He didn’t realize that Rikke kept a key. She let herself inside and turned on the light, not caring if Finn saw the glow from his bedroom window when he drove home. The room was messy. Soiled clothes were strewn across the bed and draped over the closet door. Crushed cans of Budweiser littered the floor like silver hockey pucks. She smelled urine from his sheets. He still wet the bed.

The top drawer of his black lacquer nightstand was open. She yanked it out and overturned the drawer onto the floor, where the contents rolled and clattered. She did the same with the bottom drawer. She got down on all fours and pushed through the pile of junk with her hands. Finn saved everything. Old cell phones and computer cables. Half-completed tax forms. Dried-up pens and pencils snapped in half. Thumbed porno magazines, bottles of lubricant, and rubber strokers crusted over with discharge.

An old photograph.

Rikke held it up and stared at it. The picture was four inches square, with a narrow white border, its colors faded and unnatural. She recognized Finn in the backyard of their house, sitting next to Laura at a picnic bench, with his arm around her shoulder. They were young and smiling. Laura wore a tank top. Finn was bare-chested, his blond hair curly and big. Rikke remembered taking the photograph. She held it, her hands trembling, then tore it in half, and tore it in half again, and again, until the pieces were too small to rip. She scattered them like pinches of coarse salt over the mess on the floor.

Back then, Finn had given up his room for Laura on those nights when she stayed over. She had slept here in his twin bed, while he slept on the sofa downstairs. Except when he would creep upstairs and watch. Rikke knew all about it. She had seen him hovering in the blackness of the doorway to his room, staring at his bed, where the stars glowed faintly and illuminated bare flesh. They never talked about it. Some things were just understood.