Like she does every morning, the first thing Finn does on Sunday morning is check her work email, but nothing new has come in. So instead of jumping into warning mode, she wanders down to the river with her cup of coffee and heads out onto the dock. The grass is wet from an early-morning rain, but the sun is peeking out from behind the clouds, and Finn can tell it’s going to be one of those humid northwestern Ontario summer days, the air hot and heavy and still. Crouching down at the end of the dock, she dips her hand into the water, feeling the current pulling eastward, albeit weakly. She wishes she could take off all her clothes and jump in, like she and Nicki used to do as kids – floating downstream on inner tubes tethered together and getting their father to tow them back upriver behind the Miss Penelope. Instead, she slips off her shoes and sits down with her legs dangling over the edge. The river is so low that her feet barely graze the surface of the water, but it’s enough for now.

Although the Miss Penelope is not in its usual spot in the river behind the house, the Serafina and the Veronica are docked, rustling against each other in the current. Those stupid boats. Her father has always treated them as some kind of stand-ins for his daughters, like they were less whiny, more lake-faring avatars of Nicki and Finn. “Boats,” he would say, looking at them with a mixture of sadness and bafflement, “come with instruction manuals.” In some ways, Finn supposes that she and her father are very alike – wanting everything to be quantified, compartmentalized, laid out step by step. Including people.

Earlier that morning, he had shown up at her door the way he used to when she was a teenager, making loon calls to wake her up, his hands cupped around his mouth, while Finn had lain there with her eyes squeezed shut, pretending to be asleep.

“Finn?” he had said, opening the sunroom door. “Are you awake? Do you want to come on the coffee cruise?”

She groaned. “Oh my god, Dad, it’s seven in the morning,” she said, rolling over.

“Yup, the best time of day.”

“Seven a.m. shouldn’t even be a time of day.” She knew she sounded like a bratty teenager, but she couldn’t help it. Being back home was making her regress to adolescence.

Walter took a step towards her, peering into her face. “Are you okay? What happened to your nose?”

Finn reached up and touched her face, the night’s events tumbling back into her memory. “Nothing,” she said, an auto-pilot response left over from a childhood full of her father’s interrogations. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. It looks like it might be broken.” He made a small move towards her, and she recoiled, pulling the blankets tighter around her chin.