It wasn’t until the next morning, when Finn picked them up from the hotel in Nicki’s car and Hamish recognized the Civic – the Minnie Mouse figurine hanging from the rear-view mirror, the dented bumper – that he put it all together. But by then it was too late. He had already proposed to Nicki in what Finn can only assume was a complete drunken stupor, although Nicki had sworn up and down on the phone that they were “basically sober” and just “retardedly in love.”

Finn doesn’t know if Hamish knew then that Nicki was ten years older than him, or that she had four children with three different fathers, but she’s quite certain that on some level he must have known that his marrying Nicki was actually one of the twelve prophecies of Nostradamus predicting the end of the world. Still, ever true to his word, six weeks later young Hamish stood up in his kilt and ghillies on the wooden landing beneath the Visitors Centre at Fort William Historical Park in front of almost 150 people and vowed to love Finn’s twin sister until the heavens rained down fire and the streets flowed with the boiling blood of innocents and the earth opened up and swallowed all of mankind – or at least that’s what it sounded like to Finn.

Although Finn was sure an annulment was imminent before sunrise, Nicki and Hamish seemed maddeningly happy. They had a family dinner the next night, and the newly married couple sat at the table with their hands on each other’s thighs, making out between courses while the kids all made barfing noises. Later, they gathered round the computer and looked at pictures from their pre-wedding trip to Winnipeg, Nicki sitting on Hamish’s lap. “Clearly I stopped at the right place,” Hamish said in this heartbreakingly optimistic little voice, showing them photos of trees and rocks and trees and rocks and then that flat, endless prairie as soon as you cross the border into Manitoba, before moving on to photos from the wedding, their father in a suit that he hadn’t worn since the sixties, their mother with flowers in her hair, Nicki and Hamish watching the sunset over the Kam from the back deck.

“It’s beautiful,” Kate said, her eyes not on the pictures but on the chocolate curls of her new son-in-law.

“God’s country,” Hamish said, his fingers tracing a pattern on the inside of Nicki’s arm.