Katriina cancels her open house and arranges for her sister, Hanna, to pick Petey up from soccer and Tommy from tae kwon do. At the hospital, she stops in at the gift shop and buys a card and a potted plant. The front of the card says, “Hear you’re under the weather” and has a picture of a bunny holding an umbrella. She signs it with a pen she borrows from the salesclerk. Lots of love, Shawn, Katriina, Tommy, Petey. The way she signs every card, as though people won’t be able to tell that all the names have been written by one person.

She takes the back elevators to the eighth-floor trauma ward, as Shawn instructed, managing to avoid the throng of reporters gathered at the hospital’s entrance. When the doors open, she sees Shawn standing by the nurses’ station, talking on his cell phone. He looks up as she walks down the hall towards him and raises a finger, telling her to wait. “Oh my god, get over yourself, Vinnie.”

“Who’s Vinnie?” Katriina asks, putting her hand on his back. She assumes it’s someone at Kahvila, the restaurant that Shawn manages for her father, maybe a new waiter or busboy. But Shawn just stares at her like she’s crazy, and she realizes too late that he’s actually said “Finnie.”

“Serafina,” he says, pressing the phone against his chest.

“Oh,” says Katriina, dropping her hand from Shawn’s back. “How nice that you called her.” It has been months since Shawn has talked to Finn, as far as Katriina knows. But it makes sense that he would call her to tell her about her mother. He is a good brother, he wants her to know, Katriina assures herself. Even if Finn doesn’t actually care.

“She called me,” Shawn says. He puts the phone back to his ear. “What stuff?”

Katriina moves down the hall to wait out the conversation, staring at the fire escape route map on the wall next to the stairwell. It’s not that she doesn’t like Finn. It’s just that whenever Shawn wants to take Katriina down a peg, he brings up his sister. Not on purpose, of course. But if Katriina is ever apprehensive about trying something new, there is always the story about how Finn moved to a new city where she didn’t know anyone on her own; if Katriina worries about what the neighbours will think of their overgrown hedge, there is that time Finn told her neighbour to go fuck himself because she caught him looking in her window while she was changing. In Shawn’s mind, Finn is the brave one, the one who does what she wants, who stands up for herself – unlike Katriina, so submissive, so appeasing, so bland. He would never say these things to her, of course, but she knows he thinks them.