Chapters (46)
- Cover
- Other Titles
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Friday
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- Saturday
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- Sunday
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- Monday
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“I’m fine,” says Nicki. But she’s not fine at all. She is tired. She lies back on the bed and stares at the ceiling, trying to imagine a place that is as far away from here as possible. Then in her mind she takes Finn and puts her there instead.
TWENTY
The trip to Europe had been Martha Jane’s idea. Kate would have been perfectly happy staying home in Fort William and dancing with the Bombardier boys on Saturday nights, but Martha Jane said they needed to have an adventure before they settled down. “We’re only twenty,” she reminded Kate. “We have our whole lives to be boring housewives. At least we should see the world first.”
Kate couldn’t imagine what there was to see. Paris, Venice, Rome, Barcelona – they were all just cities, with buildings and roads and cars and people, the same as home. The only difference was they didn’t speak English, although sometimes on Fridays if you went down to the Prosvita on Simpson Street for perogies and cabbage rolls, you might think the same thing of Fort William. She kept asking Martha Jane: what river could be more melancholy than the Kam? What mountain could be more majestic than Mount McKay? There couldn’t be falls greater than Kakabeka, and there most certainly was no lake bigger than Lake Superior. That was just a scientific fact.
Martha Jane came from a family of seven girls, of which she was the second youngest. Had she been the youngest, perhaps she would have felt differently about the world. Her baby sister, Rosie, was everyone’s little doll, her dresses always immaculate, her hair always perfectly plaited by six devoted sets of hands. Martha Jane had experienced the euphoria of this particular adoration for exactly five years before Rosie came along, so she knew what she was missing. Kate was an only child, a late-in-life surprise to two mostly uninterested parents. She had few friends, and since the incident at Chippewa she had even pushed Walter away, for reasons she didn’t understand herself. Kate and Martha Jane saw themselves as two lone wolves who didn’t need anyone to help them through life. It seemed natural that they would have been drawn to each other when they met at the seamstress shop where they both worked. And although Kate was hesitant at first, it seemed natural, too, that they would embark on this adventure together.