She prefers to picture Shawn during his train-hopping days like a hobo in a cartoon, playing a harmonica in overalls and a floppy hat, a bright red bandana tied into a bindle and balanced on his shoulder. Once, when they had been dating for a few months, Katriina asked him if he had ever been scared of wild animals, and he just shook his head and turned away, and she realized that what he had seen on the street was far more terrifying than anything he could have encountered in the bush. His entire life had been fight or flight. Since then she had tried to keep him safe, keep the bad things away from him as much as she could. But telling him about the second miscarriage felt like opening the door to a new kind of animal, something that he couldn’t fight or fly from, something that was impossible to understand because it made no sense – the person he loved breaking his heart over and over again, denying him the thing he wanted the most.

“It’s fine, it’s normal, these things happen all the time. It’s not your fault,” he had told her again, repeating those same words as he held her in their bed that night. But later, after he fell asleep, she wondered: wasn’t it?

—

Under ordinary circumstances, Katriina would have been the one to take charge – set up camp at Kate and Walter’s house on Victor Street, bake casseroles, field calls from friends and family, do laundry, help Nicki keep all the kids under control. But today she just doesn’t have the energy. Instead, when she leaves the hospital a few hours later, she stops in at the Paulsson place, pulling into the driveway and sitting in her car with the air conditioning blasting. Eventually she gets out, walks up the overgrown pathway, and lets herself inside.

The Paulsson place has been on the market for over a year, ever since that winter morning when Margaret Paulsson went into her twelve-year-old daughter Claudia’s bedroom to wake her up for school and found her hanging from a leather belt attached to the ceiling fan. Had Katriina known this, she never would have signed on to sell the house. Thunder Bay was a small city, and the neighbourhood of Westfort was even smaller. Everyone knew what had happened to Claudia Paulsson. The house was unsellable.

Katriina has heard all the theories – Claudia had been cyber-bullied, a buzzword people can recognize from all the afternoon talk shows, or there was some kind of abuse going on in the home. But Katriina has met Margaret Paulsson, a single mother and school librarian with a pixie cut and wire-framed glasses who is barely taller than Petey, and she just can’t picture it. But people will surprise you.