London, Vienna, Milan. And Ross. Nicki has never been to London, Vienna, or Milan, although she did go camping in Rossport in high school – drunken, hormone-fuelled weekends to which Finn was never invited. Nicki had been planning a trip to Europe when she finished high school, and kept a map on her bedroom wall with pins stuck in all the cities she wanted to visit. Then she found out she was pregnant, by either the Native kid who sold her a voltage adapter at Future Shop or the one who sold her smokes out at the reserve. She still hadn’t made it off the continent a year and a half later when, on a twenty-first-birthday trip to Minneapolis with some of her old cheerleading friends, she met a Nigerian engineering student working as a waiter at the Tony Roma’s in Mall of America whose name she couldn’t remember past “there might have been an M in it.” Nine months later, she had twin girls delivered by C-section while Finn sat at home studying for her literary theory final. The last time Finn was home Nicki still had that map on the wall, although Finn assumes the pins are now just potential future baby names.

Finn has always called her nieces by their first initials to avoid her own embarrassment: L, V, and M. They don’t seem to mind – they call her Aunt F, as though her name were a curse word. Her nephew, Finn doesn’t call anything at all, if she can help it. Most of the time she can’t even bear to look at him.

“Did you know that some commercial shark fishermen will just, like, catch the shark, cut off their fins, and then totally just fucking throw away the rest of the body?”

“Nice language, L,” Finn says.

London’s eyes flick towards the doorway and then just as quickly back to the TV. “Hi, Aunt F,” she says. Finn isn’t exactly surprised by her dismissiveness – according to Shawn, London was pretty upset when Finn left. Still, she’s surprised at how much it stings.

But Milan and Vienna both jump up to hug her, shouting, “Aunt F, Aunt F!” They’re thirteen, just on the cusp of adolescence, and unlike London, who is sixteen and apparently knows everything, they still have their moments of being adorable. They are also clearly still inseparable, judging by their identical T-shirts and barrettes, their matching lopsided smiles, their stereo chatter – something that causes Finn tiny pangs of jealousy whenever she’s around them. There was a time, believe it or not, when Nicki and Finn were like that – safe within their own twin world, not so much reading each other’s mind as simply having the same thoughts.