Shawn and Katriina’s wedding was eleven years ago, in the dark days before social media, but Nicki could have easily uploaded some old photos as well. Finn isn’t friends with Nicki, so all the photos are new to her. Scrolling through Nicki’s albums is like seeing a time lapse of her kids growing up – birthdays, Christmases, vacations, graduations, what must be thousands of photos of Nicki and Hamish’s wedding. Finn finds it all hard to look at – she knows that everything always appears so much better online than it actually is in real life, but everyone is just so damn happy. And she missed it all.

There are a few non-family photos as well, all of which seem to involve large groups of heavily made-up women, a lot of cleavage, and brightly coloured drinks in dark bars. Nothing from Shawn and Katriina’s wedding, nothing from any other earlier family functions that would have included Kate. There are no photos of her mother at all, Finn realizes, as she scans row after row of thumbnails, searching for someone resembling her mother. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised. Even when they were kids, Kate was always the one behind the camera, snapping away at every opportunity, telling them to smile, waving off the occasional offer to have her own photo taken.

“No one wants to look at this face when they can look at your beautiful faces,” she used to say when they were little. Later, she’d say nothing at all, just laugh as though the thought of someone taking her photo was absurd. What happened to all those photos Kate took? Does her mother ever look at them anymore, or are they just sitting in a box somewhere, fading a little more with each passing year?

The phone rings, startling Finn out of her thoughts.

“Oh, Finn,” Nicki says when she answers. “You’re home.”

“Uh, yeah,” Finn says, stretching the phone cord to peek out to the garage, where Nicki should be, cutting hair and plucking the eyebrows of all the Vickers Heights royalty. “Aren’t you?”

“Hamish’s truck broke down on the way to meet a client,” she says. Hamish claims he has a “business” and calls his customers “clients,” but what he really does is buy crap at police auctions or on eBay, puts a coat of paint on it, and then sells it to dumb rich people for a huge markup. He also sells bootlegged whisky on the side, but they are not supposed to talk about that. “I had to pick him up and take him to Terrace Bay.”

“So, you’re, what, three hours away?” Finn asks, trying to remember where Terrace Bay is. One of those tiny towns along the North Shore, fighting for survival as the pulp and paper industry collapses and the trains stop coming through. It would be depressing if she ever actually thought about it.

“Yeah. Is London there?”