She takes the pack and twirls it around in her hand. “I just don’t want to be left out of everything.”

“Finn, the only reason you’ve been left out is because you left.”

“Because Mom wanted me to!” she says a little too loudly. She can hear her voice carry out across the river. “Because she always chose Nicki over me.”

“She protected you from Nicki,” says Shawn. “You just couldn’t see it.” He pauses. “But you know this isn’t about Nicki. You think that Kate pushed you away. But did you ever think maybe she was trying to push you towards something instead?”

Finn pictures her mother, smiling in the kitchen window and waving as the school bus pulled up to the driveway. Had she just been playing the part of the happy housewife, when all along she was yearning to know what lay beyond the four walls of Victor Street and the limits of her life? Had she moved through her days with a hollow longing in the pit of her stomach for all the things she was told she shouldn’t want? Had she felt the same restlessness that Finn did?

“No,” says Finn. “That’s stupid.” Suddenly her body is shuddering with sobs, but once she’s started, she can’t stop. “That’s the…stupidest thing I…ever heard.”

Shawn puts his arm around her, and she leans against him and rests her head on his shoulder. The tears just keep coming, soaking through Shawn’s T-shirt and making her already swollen nose feel like it’s going to explode. I should have stayed in bed, she thinks. No rollbar is as bad as this.

After a while she asks, “Do you remember the day Mom fell off the roof?”

“You mean when Nicki and Dallas first slept together?”

Finn lifts her head. “You said first.” Shawn doesn’t say anything. She puts her head back down on his shoulder. “You know about Nicki and Dallas, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

Neither of them says anything. Above them Finn can make out the Big Dipper hanging low over the river, still the only constellation she can pick out by sight. Just one more way she let her father down. “Everything changed that day.” She means with her and Dallas, but she also means something else. Something shifted in their family, cracking the foundation, as if whatever tenuous structure that once held them all together had started to crumble. She knows Shawn feels it, too.

“Sure,” he says. “But things are supposed to change every day, Finn. That’s the way life goes. You move on. You don’t get to live in one day for the rest of your life.”

Finn wipes at her eyes, sitting up straight. “Everyone always says that, Shawn. But how do you do that? How do you move on, in real, practical terms? I don’t know how to do that.”