Katriina’s second miscarriage came six months later, a few hours after she had found out she was the number one sales representative at Blue Sky Real Estate in the Superior North Region for the first quarter of 2011. They were celebrating, everyone sitting in the backyard at her parents’ place, Katriina and Shawn and Hanna and one of Hanna’s boyfriends, the kids chasing a soccer ball. They hadn’t yet told her parents that she was pregnant, and sitting there in a lawn chair with a virgin mai tai in her hand, she suddenly knew she wasn’t pregnant anymore. She turned to Shawn, who was standing in front of the barbecue flipping hamburgers for the kids and searing steaks for the adults, a grimy white apron hanging loose over his wide chest.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said, tipping forward in the chair, pressing her legs together as if she were trying to fuse them into one. He raised one eyebrow at her. The words “I need help” heavy and awkward in her mouth, a handful of marbles stuffed into her cheeks. “How are the steaks coming?” was all she could manage.

His eyebrow collapsed back down. “I told you, they have to be medium-well,” he said. When she had been pregnant first with Tommy and then with Petey, Shawn had barely understood any of the risks – it was all fun, talking to her belly, playing with her suddenly massive breasts – but now it was as if he had turned into a walking medical dictionary. When Katriina had requested her steak rare, he just shook his head, as though she wasn’t taking their future seriously enough. As if she wasn’t doing her best.

Shawn has told Katriina about his past. She knows about the drugs, and the stealing, and the fighting. She knows about the trains, how he would hop on empty railway cars, chugging back and forth across the country, sleeping in the woods or breaking into homes along the tracks and trading the things he stole for food, sometimes staying in abandoned buildings in the city with other street kids. About his real family, Katriina knows next to nothing. She knows he lost his mother when he was very young, too young to remember her as anything more than a black eye and a hunched back on her hands and knees cleaning broken glass from the kitchen floor. She knows his father worked too much and showed his affection first with an open palm, later with a fist; that he remarried a woman half his age who did something to Shawn that he still won’t tell her about. She knows he had been on the run for close to three years before coming to live with the Parkers.