Katriina suddenly has a memory of Kate standing in the kitchen at Victor Street three weeks earlier. She was washing dishes, her hands plunged in the sink, her grey curls pulled back from her face with a band that looked like it had been made out of an old athletic sock. “Did you know that Bobby Leach, one of the first men to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, later died of gangrene contracted after he fractured his leg slipping on an orange peel?”

“Where did you learn that?” Katriina had asked, a dishtowel in her hand, her attention half focused on the boys in the front yard, making their way a little too high up in a tree.

Kate slopped water over a plate, soaking the sleeve of her hoodie, though she didn’t appear to notice. “Any of us could die at any time,” she said. “But how many of us could say we went over a waterfall in a barrel?”

Now, Katriina scratches her fingernails lightly across her forearm. “No, not that I can think of.”

After she hangs up, she snaps the elastic against her wrist again. Why hadn’t she said anything earlier? What if she had been able to stop this? “Be a better daughter-in-law,” she whispers into the monitor of her laptop while staring at the reflection of her own lean, pale face layered over the only slightly Photoshopped picture of the Paulsson place. “Be a better daughter-in-law,” she says again.

A few minutes later, she is getting ready to leave for the hospital when her stomach cramps. She runs to the bathroom, locks the door, and vomits in the sink. She doesn’t even bother to check for the blood between her legs – she knows it is there. When she comes out of the washroom, Krista Shepherd is standing by the door with her arms crossed. Krista with her perfect highlights and throaty laugh and one-hundred-percent sales record, a vulture who waits for other agents to fail so that she can pick their bones clean.

“Feeling okay, Katriina?” Krista asks.

“Perfect,” says Katriina, raising her hand to her mouth, hoping she hadn’t missed cleaning any traces of vomit.

“Oh, good.” Krista taps her bright red gel nails against the back of her iPhone. “Wouldn’t want you to get sick with month-end coming up.” Her teeth are so white they are actually glowing, ethereally, like ghost teeth.

Katriina feels like she might vomit again. As she leaves the office and walks out to her car, she pulls the band on her wrist. “Be a better liar,” she whispers.