Katriina knows that the main reason Shawn wants to have another baby is because he thinks it will save their marriage. It’s not that she and Shawn don’t love each other, or even that they fight, or have resentments; there is no cheating or lying or drinking or abuse. It’s just that after all this time together they seem to have nothing left to say. When they were first married, all they did was talk: late into the night the way new couples do, over food and wine or while trying to watch a movie, lying in bed after sex, playing each other their favourite songs. They didn’t have much in common then – at least, not in the way she had had with the other guys she dated before, all good Finnish boys whose parents were friends with her parents, who worked as busboys at Kahvila on weekends after hockey practice and still spent Sunday afternoons with their mummus making pulla. What Katriina and Shawn loved then was the sound of their own voices, the radiant glow of their own beautiful goddamned hearts. Then they loved Tommy and Petey when they came along, one year after the other, right at a time when that glow was starting to dim – they loved being new parents, loved the attention it brought them from both their families, how it gave them something to concentrate on other than each other.

But now that Tommy and Petey are older and starting to have their own lives, their own interests, Katriina is beginning to realize how rarely she and Shawn see each other most days. One of them always comes home late, either Shawn from the restaurant or Katriina from an open house, and then he is up at the crack of dawn to oversee breakfast service, or she is rushing out to meet with a potential client, leaving them to text each other during the day about where the kids are, who is going to pick them up, what they are going to have for dinner, whether they need anything at Shoppers Drug Mart, who they will call to fix the driveway. On the odd occasions when they do run into each other – in the bathroom in the morning while brushing their teeth, or collapsed on the couch for a quick glass of wine before going up to bed – they speak awkwardly, politely, as though they are strangers. Katriina can’t even remember the last time Shawn kissed her on the mouth instead of on the forehead as he is running out the door. When they have sex, it’s like a chore being completed, and only then because they’ve decided it is time to try for a third child, so they will have something to talk about again, so they will have something novel to interrupt the monotony of their everyday lives.