Walter has always loved Finn, just – heaven help him – not as much as he loves Nicki. He would never tell anyone that, of course. But there is too much of Kate in Finn, too much of that dangerous restlessness and unpredictability, the desire for something bigger, for something more, that drives her to push away everyone who loves her. When she told him and Kate that she was moving to Japan, he had been happy for her – she would be away from Thunder Bay and all the myriad things she hated about it – and when she came back, he had almost been disappointed. “I thought you might meet a nice Japanese man and we’d all have to sit on the floor and eat rice at your wedding,” he’d joked one night at dinner, prompting a rant about how racist he was and how backward everyone here was, how clueless and provincial. After that, Walter found himself watching everything he said around her, trying to avoid setting her off again.

Years later, when Finn finally did leave for good, she had already pushed everyone in the family away so much that it took almost a week for any of them to notice she was gone. One evening, Kate came into their bedroom with a confused expression on her face. “I just called Finn’s apartment, and she doesn’t live there anymore.”

Walter sighed. “That’s ridiculous.” He was already in bed, engrossed in a Maclean’s article about Canadian troops in Kandahar. “You must have gotten mixed up.”

“No, I talked to her roommate. What’s her name? Amanda?”

“Alyssa?”

Kate didn’t say anything. When Walter finally glanced up, she was crying. “Katie, I’m sure everything is fine. You probably misheard her. Finn wouldn’t move without telling us.”

Shaking her head, Kate reached for a Kleenex on the bedside table. “No. She’s gone.” There was something in her eyes that made Walter’s breath catch, something he had seen only a few times before – a deep clarity, a knowing that went deeper than anything Walter could understand. And seeing that, he suddenly knew too. Finn really was gone. Just like that, without a word to anyone, propelled away from Thunder Bay not by a desire to be somewhere else but by a desire to be anywhere but here.

Yes, there is so much of Kate in Finn, but there is so much of Walter, too. And the older he gets, the more he wonders if that is the part of Finn that he really finds difficult to love.

As Walter is untying the boat and preparing to head home, a man in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt he doesn’t recognize comes up to him.

“Walter,” he says. “James Buhler. We went to high school together.”