Upstairs, she can hear Nicki and Hamish talking in low voices in their room. Is Nicki telling him about Dallas? she wonders. But she immediately shuts that thought down. She doesn’t want to think about Nicki and Dallas, sneaking around having sex with each other like hormonal teenagers. She doesn’t want to think about Tanya, standing there doing nothing while Dallas ruins her life, or Hamish, whose life is probably already ruined. She doesn’t want to think about Kate – Kate her mother, somewhere out there with two broken ribs, a fractured pelvis, two chipped front teeth, a ripped-off pinky nail, and a severe concussion, or Kate the passed-out girl, who most certainly has some level of alcohol poisoning. She doesn’t want to think about anything to do with this family, with this house, with this fucking city. She just wants to go to sleep.

But of course she can’t sleep because the sunroom is hot and stuffy, and her eyes are continuously watering from all the dust in the old duvet, and there is a metal rollbar digging into her back. She tosses and turns for another hour before giving up, pulling on a pair of shorts, and walking through the finally silent house and out onto the back deck.

Once she is outside, she tilts her head up to the sky, staring at the thick wash of stars. It’s hard to believe that all these stars are always there, even when they’re not visible. She can remember Walter trying to teach her about the constellations when she was a kid, Andromeda, Ursa Major, Perseus, and his favourite, Draco, the dragon who guards the pole star. Finn had tried to love the stars – she always thought it would make her father love her more. But no matter how hard she tried, she could never see the constellations. To her, they were just sets of stars grouped together by astronomers. Stars with nothing in common, likely not even close to each other in reality, travelling on their own separate orbits through the galaxy yet locked together for the entire span of their lives because someone thought that they formed the shape of a bear, or a spoon, or a guy with a bow.

Her father probably thought she was just being stubborn. But she remembers Kate telling her once that Walter couldn’t see the shape of the Sleeping Giant, so you’d think he’d be a little more understanding. Maybe it’s genetic, she thinks, this lack of ability to see the shape of things in other things: rock formations, constellations, even the shape their family took. If neither she nor her father could recognize its contours and edges, how could they be expected to fit themselves into it without changing its fundamental form? Without screwing it up? Maybe that’s why she and her father are both outsiders. Why couldn’t she see that before? Oh. Right.