She pays the driver and stands on the lawn for a few moments, scratching Bruno’s head and staring at the front door, willing herself to climb up the steps and open it. If this were a movie, a montage of front-porch-related scenes would flash through her mind, with sentimental music playing in the background. Her first kiss, at fourteen, with Ben Stickney, that set off the sensor light and scared the crap out of both of them. That afternoon she spent playing cards and drinking beer on the steps with Shawn, when he told her he was getting married. Her father dressed as a scarecrow on Halloween to frighten the trick-or-treaters. Tying her niece London’s roller skates before carrying her over the gravel driveway to the paved road. But this is not a movie, and so Finn thinks only of that morning three years ago when she left, quietly closing the door behind her, not looking back.

If you ask Finn’s father, he will tell you their house was the first one built along the Kaministiquia River back in the 1860s, when the land was opened for settlement, before the construction of the CPR and the Neebing rail yards, when the actual fort in Fort William was just beginning to fade into obsolescence. The house is set back nearly fifty metres from the road, and the land stretches another hundred metres back to the Kam – a generous property, even by semi-rural Vickers Heights standards. Her father’s story is that the man he bought the house from—an Italian immigrant named Vittorio—was actually the one who built it. But Kate would respond, “We bought the house in 1973, Walter. Do you really think the man who pinched my bum while showing us the bathroom was 120 years old?”

Finn puts her hand on the doorknob, takes a deep breath, and turns it. The smell hits her immediately, that distinct Victor Street smell. Dryer sheets and roast chicken, Nicki used to call it, although Finn always thought it was more hair product and wet dog. She has to plough through piles of shoes to get the door open wide enough to let her suitcase through, which is nothing new – the hall closet had never been big enough, hats and mittens and skates and umbrellas forever spilling out into the foyer. Finn gives up, leaves her suitcase on top of the pile, and steps through the entryway into the kitchen. Please don’t let anyone be home.

Nicki and Katriina are sitting at the wooden table with mugs of acrid-smelling coffee. Figures, thinks Finn. The exact wrong combination of people. Katriina is dressed in her real estate agent finest: a blouse and pencil skirt, her blond hair pulled back severely into a flawless ponytail. Nicki is flipping through a magazine, and she doesn’t look up when Finn comes in.

“Oh, hi,” says Nicki. “You made it.”