Finn watches him for a few minutes with the Lego, trying to figure out his system. She picks up a long green piece, but he shakes his head. “Have you ever met your dad?” she asks him.

“No. Mom says he lives far away, and that he’s a bad word that I’m not allowed to say.”

“That’s not entirely true.” She doesn’t know why she feels the need to defend Dallas all of a sudden. “He’s a nice person. And he likes to make things, just like you do.” Liked, she thinks. She doesn’t know anything about Dallas now: what he likes, what he doesn’t, if he still writes plays, if he ever wrote one for Tanya. She touches her nose. It’s tender, but not broken. She can’t even punch right. Dallas deserves better.

“What does he make?” Ross asks.

“Well…” Finn thinks for a minute. “He was a great cook. He could make anything in the kitchen, even if you didn’t have many ingredients.” That wasn’t exactly true: Dallas could cook, but he needed to have the very best of everything, the perfect setup, all the right tools, or else he would just have a complete meltdown and you’d end up having to order pizza. “He was a perfectionist,” she says.

“I don’t know what that means,” says Ross.

“It means he wanted everything to turn out perfect. Just like your tower.”

“My tower isn’t perfect. It’s ugly.”

“Then why do you keep building it?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just can’t stop until it’s finished.”

Now Finn remembers why she never talked to Ross before. There’s so much of this conversation that is Dallas: the bluntness, the oddball logic. “Then that means you’re a perfectionist, too.” She can’t speak after that, so they just sit together in the basement in silence, sorting through Lego. Although Ross looks like he would be an oaf, boorish and clumsy, with his wide face and high forehead, his torso too big for his stubby arms and legs, there is actually a strange and eerie grace to his movements. She watches his chubby, precise fingers flitting over the plastic blocks, the economy of his movements, each muscle isolated, like a dancer. Unlike his sisters’ narrow, grey Parker eyes, his are all Vaughn, watery-blue and innocent, and will likely stay that way even after the innocence becomes just a facade, a shtick – those eyes will get him off the hook for the rest of his life.