God’s country. Finn didn’t have the heart to tell him about the Rocky Mountains, Saskatchewan sunsets, the Pacific Ocean. Better to let him believe the lie he had been telling himself about where he had ended up, the great city of Thunder Bay. Let him believe that the Sleeping Giant is magic, that the basin of Lake Superior is lined with fucking gold, and that everything west of here is shite. Let him believe he had found the most beautiful woman to grace the annals of history, that Scuttlebutts was some kind of enchanted fairy-tale castle, and he had become the luckiest man in all seven kingdoms the moment that Nicki had put her pink-lipsticked mouth on his ear on that grimy dance floor and told him she loved this song so much and oh my god did he want to go buy her a Jäger Bomb because she could really use, like, a jolt of something, you know.

It was better that way. It was none of her business. It was better to let it go.

Except she got drunk, and she couldn’t just let it go. So after dinner she took her new brother-in-law out onto the back deck and by the light of a gorgeous harvest moon reflecting off the river that seemed frustratingly determined to disprove her point, she told him that he had, in fact, picked the exact worst place in the entire country to stop.

“There are trees in Vancouver you can drive your car through,” she vaguely remembers telling him. “It’s green there all year round, and they have beaches, and sushi, and the best weed.” She was obsessed, suddenly, with Vancouver, even though she had never been there herself. She just wanted him to understand that there was something else out there, something so much better than this.

“It cannae be green all year,” he said, not meeting her eyes.

“And the beaches are right in the city, and they go on for miles,” she said. “You’d have to see it yourself to believe it.”

Was she not supposed to love her sister? To watch out for her best interests? To try to protect her from heartbreak, from sorrow, from all the terrible things the world has in store for her, instead of leading those same terrible things straight to her doorstep? Was she not the responsible one, the one with the head on her shoulders? Was she not the goddamned Warning Girl? Well, fuck it. Fuck all those things. After a bottle and a half of wine, Finn wasn’t sure Nicki deserved her protection. She certainly didn’t deserve Hamish. No, Nicki didn’t deserve anything except a helping of the same abject goddamn misery she had caused Finn when she slept with Dallas.