Immediately after Nicki found out she was pregnant, Dallas skipped town. Finn heard through her friend Alyssa that he had moved to one of those crunchy-granola islands off the coast of B.C. Not that this was surprising to anyone. After all, Nicki already had three daughters – by then seven and four and four – three beautiful, spoiled, toffee-skinned girls parading in full princess regalia around the house, stuffing marshmallows in the mailbox, feeding Silly Putty to Bruno, and making peanut butter in the kitchen by scattering nuts all over the floor and roller-skating over them, even though their grandfather is allergic. Their mother’s girls, all three of them.

Finn spent two months at Victor Street dodging those princesses – and their angry pregnant mother – before she’d had enough and took her newly acquired master’s degree in English to Japan to teach ESL. When she came back the next summer, with a fat bank account and the prerequisite collection of photographs of monasteries and cherry blossoms and neon signs, her moral superiority was unimpeachable, her pretentiousness off the charts.

“Hairdressing school?” she said to Nicki. “Well, sure. I guess that makes sense for you.” As though travelling to the other side of the world to mope around her tiny apartment eating noodles and watching Japanese TV somehow proved that Finn was winning their unspoken war over who was having a better life. She kept her supposed victory wrapped tightly around her at night, when she could hear her infant nephew crying in the next room, could hear his mother cooing at him as she rocked him back to sleep. Even though Finn had never held him, never even looked in his eyes, still he haunted her – a glimpse of the back of his head or the scent of baby powder in the air momentarily stopping her breath.

Nicki managed to graduate by the time Ross was four months old, and set up a salon in their parents’ garage, cutting the hair of all the women in the neighbourhood with one hand while jiggling Ross in the other, telling everyone about how she was going to raise him to be a real man, unlike his no-good daddy. By then, Finn had moved in with Alyssa and gone back to her job at the bookstore. She found a new bar to hang out at, new television shows to watch at night, new things to hate about living in Thunder Bay. Nothing had changed from when she lived with Dallas, except everything had. Because now Finn was alone.

Finn liked to tell people that by age twenty-six, Nicki had made four lives and destroyed one. Of course, Finn was always careful to stress that she meant it had been Nicki’s own life she had destroyed. And yet.