Shawn sighed. “I just got to the hospital. I have to find someone to cover for me at the restaurant. And I still have to figure out who’s going to pick up the kids.” Shawn’s boys were named Tommy and Petey. That way, Shawn always said, when they were grown-ups they could be Thomas and Peter. And then when they were old men, they could be Tom and Pete. Their names could be modified to fit any stage of life. Finn imagines Shawn likes this because Shawn was just Shawn, you couldn’t even make a nickname out of it except for maybe Shawny, which sounded less like a person and more like a town or a piece of farm equipment.

Shawn’s wife’s name was Katriina. No one ever called her anything but Katriina.

“First you need to tell me what’s going on,” Finn said. She started pacing the yard, the too-long grass prickling her bare feet. “The reporter said something about Kakabeka Falls?”

“Yeah.” In the background, she could hear a tinny voice droning over a loudspeaker, an unintelligible din that Shawn practically had to yell over. “She went over.”

“She…went over?”

“The falls, Finn. She went over the fucking falls.”

“Oh my god. When?” asked Finn, hoping to hell it wasn’t two days ago, two weeks ago, two months ago.

“This morning.”

The droning stopped. In the resulting quiet, Finn could hear her own heart firing off in her chest. “She got caught in the current?” she asked hopefully. But somewhere inside her, she knew what the answer was.

“No.” Finn heard the sound of a door closing. “Kate went over the falls on purpose,” Shawn said, his voice low.

And there it was. “How do you know?”

There was a long pause. “She was in a barrel,” Shawn said. “One of Hamish’s,” he added, as if it made any difference whose barrel it was.

Finn sat back down on the step. She had a sudden, sharp memory of her mother, years ago, standing in her kitchen on Victor Street, talking about something she had seen on television. Annie Edson Taylor, that was it, a sixty-three-year-old woman who was the first person to go over Niagara Falls and survive. Finn remembered Kate sighing, gazing out the window at a far-off place in history that seemed so much prettier from a distance, saying, “I don’t know. Doesn’t it just seem like there’s nothing left to be first at these days?”

“Finn?” said Shawn. “Are you still there?”