The guys. That nebulous group of guys – and a few girls – who Dallas spent most of his time with at various bars, or house parties, or camps. Finn just couldn’t stomach one more night with them, drinking and smoking weed and playing the same five or six songs on the guitar. “Why can’t we just spend the night in for once?” she asked. “Maybe try to save some money?”

“Save money for what?”

“I don’t know, to get out of here!” This was the same fight they had, night after night, so familiar it was almost boring. “I just wish you would do something real. Why can’t we just fucking do something real?”

“What does that even mean? This is life, babe. This is real.”

She didn’t have an answer for him. She didn’t know what she wanted. All she knew was it wasn’t this.

The next morning, she woke up to Walter calling her from the hospital to tell her Kate had fallen off the roof, that he didn’t know where Nicki was, that she didn’t come home the night before. Something started ticking inside Finn then, so softly that she barely noticed it save for the slightly sick feeling it gave her – the gentle momentum propelling her towards a foregone conclusion she should have seen coming, but that still somehow totally blindsided her. She called Nicki’s cell phone, the ringing in sync with the ticking, her heart speeding up to meet the rhythm. The ticking was a warning she ignored.

“Finn? Hey, baby,” Dallas said. “I had a rough night out with the guys.”

The ticking stopped. But there was no explosion, nothing. It was like someone had cut the live wire. Everything became calm, still, eerily silent. She can remember stopping at Tim Hortons on her way to the hospital and getting a blueberry bagel with cream cheese, smiling at the woman at the drive-thru, leaving her a loonie as a tip. She sang along with the radio, a Stones song, something she didn’t even realize she knew the words to. She parked her car and ran with her hood pulled up against the rain to the emergency room doors, still humming the melody under her breath.

But when she got to the hospital and saw Nicki getting out of Dallas’s car, wearing Dallas’s shirt, and smiling at Finn as she walked through the doors like she was fucking royalty, the ticking started up again. It has been ticking ever since.

Now, the ticking finally stops. Something clicks in her brain, something that has been working its way into her consciousness since her run-in with Tanya. All these years she has blamed her inability to be in a relationship, her inability to move forward, on the scars Dallas left behind.

But this wasn’t about Dallas anymore. Maybe it never had been.

“What do you mean, you were never going anywhere?” Finn asks.