She began chopping faster. “Shawn needs a home,” she said. “We have a home with an extra bedroom. It’s simple math, really.”

“Get rid of him,” Walter said. Kate kept chopping. Walter put his hand across the top of the knife. He could feel the sting in his own eyes, the tears forming.

Kate stopped moving, still staring down at the half-chopped onion. “If he goes,” she said, her voice low, “then I go, too.” And in that one sentence, Walter heard a lifetime of unspoken ultimatums suddenly solidifying in the space between them, all of his deepest fears made real.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Kate shrugged his hand off hers and resumed chopping. Walter walked out of the house and grabbed his bike out of the shed, knowing that it was the only method of transportation he could trust himself on. If he had taken his truck or the boat, there was no guarantee that he would have come back.

When he did come back, hours later, everyone was sitting around the dining room table having dinner. The stranger, Shawn, sat in Walter’s seat, shovelling pot roast into his mouth, seemingly swallowing without even chewing. He reminded Walter of a stray dog with a piece of meat, eating as fast as possible in fear that someone would come along and take it from him. Later, Walter would learn that this was what Shawn was, essentially – a stray dog that Kate had rescued.

Finn beamed up at him from the table. “Hey, Daddy, did you know that Shawn is double-jointed? Do you want to see?”

Shawn put down his glass of milk and wiped his mouth. “I don’t think he wants to see, Finnie.”

Hearing Shawn say Finn’s name jarred something loose in Walter. That’s my daughter, he thought. You don’t say my daughter’s name. “Can I speak with you for a moment?” he said to Shawn.

“No,” said Kate, delicately working her knife through a chunk of beef. “You cannot.”

“Daddy, aren’t you going to have dinner with us?” Nicki asked.

“No, sweetheart, I’m not,” said Walter. He went into the kitchen and took his plate out of the oven and ate sitting at the kitchen table, listening to his family in the next room. For the next three days, he ate his meals alone, or stayed out in his office or working on the boats, avoiding everyone as much as possible. At night he would sneak into bed once he was sure Kate was asleep – or at least pretending to be. He knew what she was doing, and he wasn’t going to have any part of it.