She flinches away from his hand. “I don’t need you to take care of me.”

You can fix this. “We just need some Polysporin. Some rubbing alcohol. Everything will be just fine.”

“Shawn, your wife just cut up her legs with a box cutter. Do you really think that everything is just fine?”

Shawn starts pacing around the kitchen, his hands clasped on the back of his neck. “No, I don’t think everything is just fine.” He knows that getting angry is not the way to make things better, but he can’t stop himself. It’s like a freight train running straight through his heart. “I think things are actually really shitty right now. I think we have major problems with our marriage. I think you need to stop keeping things from me. And I think you need professional help for…whatever the fuck this is.” He flings the elastic band on the table.

Katriina walks over and picks it up, holding it like a baby bird in the palm of her hand. “And what about you, Shawn?” she asks quietly, still focused on the elastic. “What do you think you need to do?”

“I…I don’t know. Whatever you want me to do.”

She is silent for a moment, rubbing the elastic between her fingers. Then she raises her eyes to meet his. “I want you to take that job in Ottawa.”

Shawn’s whole body jerks. “What?”

“I want you to take that job in Ottawa,” Katriina repeats. “I want us to leave Thunder Bay. I want us to leave the Parkers.”

Leave the Parkers. The words hit him like a shot to the stomach. He sits down at the table and drops his head into his hands. He remembers his first month at Victor Street, him with one foot out the door, listening to the call of the train running by the house. Playing Parker for a week, a month, six months. A year. Ten years. If he left now, wouldn’t it all have been for nothing? Wouldn’t he just have been playing Parker for twenty-five years? Sometimes he wonders when will he have done enough to feel like a real Parker. He has been there for the birth of four children. A wedding. A cancer scare. A difficult goodbye. An epic plunge over a waterfall. But is it the big moments that make up a family? Or is it the quiet conversations on the front porch over a hand of cards, playing Star Wars in the backyard, the mundane arguments, the shared meals and baseball games and cups of tea with a shot of whisky? He doesn’t know, so he has to be there for all of them, collect them all and hope in the end they add up to something that feels like a real family.

He lifts his head and looks at Katriina. “I can’t do that.”