Kids scattered, including Milan and Vienna, who Hamish stopped at the door. “Not you two, ya wee brats.” He grabbed each girl by an arm and dragged them into the living room. While Nicki and Hamish did whatever it was that parents do to their kids when they get in trouble, Finn tried to deal with the boys in the kitchen, wiping up whipped cream with a roll of paper towels as they laughed and threw raw hamburger meat at her head.

“You know, people would like you more if you weren’t such jerks,” she said. This just made the boys laugh harder, although they moved on from the hamburger throwing to whipping each other with an old extension cord, reaffirming Finn’s decision to never, ever have children.

Ross reappeared in the kitchen. “There’s a girl asleep in my room,” he said. Then he ran away again, narrowly missing the flick of an extension cord to the back of his legs.

Things can’t possibly get any worse, Finn thought. But then she couldn’t reach either Shawn or Katriina to tell them to come pick up the boys, and Hamish had a load of machine parts he bought in Terrace Bay tied down in a trailer attached to his truck that he needed to unload right away, he was sure it was going to rain tonight and he didn’t want them to rust. And then the girl in Ross’s room was awake and puking red Gatorade all over the floor and they certainly couldn’t send her home in that state. And then Tommy and Petey locked Ross in the upstairs bathroom and he broke the handle off trying to get out and started screaming like it was the end of the world.

“Where’s London?” Nicki asked.

“I think I saw her upstairs,” said Finn, because she had seen the door to London’s room open and then close again as she was trying to fix the handle on the bathroom door – although she was too distracted by Tommy and Ross setting up a battalion of green army men around her feet ten minutes later to notice Milan coming out of London’s room wearing London’s favourite hoodie, which she never let Milan borrow, even though she promised she wouldn’t suck on the cuffs of the sleeves the way she did with every other sweater she owned. And when all the kids had been tucked up somewhere, including the inherited ones, Tommy and Petey and the passed-out girl – whose name was, ironically, Kate – and the mess was as cleaned up as it was going to get that night, and Hamish had unloaded all his parts and the bathroom door handle had been put back together with a combination of duct tape and sheer force of will, Finn collapsed back into her 70s-era hide-a-bed with the rollbar and the dusty duvet and closed her eyes.

“Fuck this day.”