“Hi, Finn.” Startled, Finn turns towards the voice to find Shawn sitting on the steps, smoking a cigarette.

“Jeez, you scared the crap out of me,” she says. “Wait, are you smoking?” Shawn tips his head back and breathes out a stream of smoke in response. She sits on the step next to him, clipping the cigarette from his fingers and taking a drag, until the smoke burns her lungs and she coughs. “Where were you tonight?” she asks, handing it back to him.

“Dealing with my wife,” he says. “I think my marriage is over.” He stubs the cigarette out against the railing and flicks the butt onto the lawn. His face is half-obscured by shadows, but she can tell that he has been crying. She’s not sure if she has ever seen Shawn cry before, but then she has a sudden memory of being very young and coming in for dinner to find him in the kitchen cooking Hamburger Helper, his face red and puffy. It couldn’t have been long after he moved in. She hadn’t really paid much attention, but now she wonders, what would make a fifteen-year-old cry like that over a skillet full of beef and noodles?

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks now, resting her head against the railing.

“She bought a house without telling me. And she’s been cutting herself.” He pulls out another cigarette and holds it between his fingers, unlit. “She also lost the baby.”

“Oh, no.” Once again, Finn finds herself searching for the right words. What would someone else’s sister say in this situation? “Is there anything I can do?”

Even in the dark she can feel Shawn glaring at her. “Don’t give me that canned sympathy bullshit,” he says. “You’re not my fucking barber.”

“Sorry,” she says. Somewhere beyond the river, she can hear the howl of a coyote. The workers out at the paper mill used to feed the coyotes, guys throwing their sandwich scraps and apple cores out onto the riverbank until the city made them stop. But by then it was too late: the coyotes had forgotten how to feed themselves. You’d find them rifling through your garbage on Monday nights, or hovering around the edges of the baseball diamonds on Sunday afternoons, waiting like begging dogs for a scrap from the dugout. Often, you would find them dead on the side of the road. Those mill guys thought they were doing something nice, feeding those coyotes. But what they really did was destroy them.

“You want kids?” Shawn asks suddenly.

Finn laughs. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Shawn rubs his hands over his face. She has always known him to be clean-shaven, but now he has the beginnings of a beard growing in. She’s not sure if this is something he’s doing on purpose, or if it’s a side effect of the past couple of days.