This was the season and the hour Kevin Gearns liked best, after the crowds departed, the guests thinned at the inn, the beaches emptied again, when the island itself seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. In another few weeks, they’d close the inn for the year. Kevin couldn’t wait. After months of nonstop guests, of cooking each night for a dozen strangers, arguing over bills and diets and bedding, they’d shutter the cottages and hang the wooden sign on the Peninsular Road “Closed for the Season.” The nights would turn chill, the trees grow bare, the roads untraveled. By the time the first frost arrived, they could finally relax. Douglas was even talking about a vacation. Lisbon, perhaps. Lake Averno. It didn’t matter much where.

The night was warm; a cotton of fog hung over the sea. Kevin had come outside for dill but lingered on the lawn, inhaling the wild tobacco, the potted jasmine. Ever since they’d bought the inn on Trachis Island, he’d wanted a moon garden, but he’d had neither the time nor the energy until that summer. He’d planted the night blooms as a surprise, furtively, on afternoons when Douglas was away. But Douglas didn’t appreciate the subtleties of trumpet lilies or Himalayan musk roses. Why, he asked, would you want flowers blooming when no one can see them? If you have to ask, Kevin felt like saying…but resisted. He simply replied: For the moths.

That summer was their tenth anniversary on Trachis Island. They’d bought the inn with money from the sale of Kevin’s mother’s house in Brookline. Kevin had the most tenuous connection to Nova Scotia: a childhood trip there one summer with his grandparents. Yet the memory of brick-red cliffs, blue water, beaches of white, speckled stones had stayed in mind, stored away, a seed lying dormant all those years. When his mother’s estate was finally settled, Kevin knew exactly what he’d do with the money—though he’d never spoken it before. Nova Scotia. The words nearly surprised him too. They would move there. They would find a place, on an island preferably. No matter that he and Douglas were Americans. No matter that he hadn’t been back since that one childhood trip. Why not the Cape? Douglas asked. Why not Fire Island? Why not—for that matter—the Jersey Shore? Kevin wouldn’t hear of it. So fraught were all of those places with memories and ghosts of those he’d cared for with Hickmans and cocktails—not to mention his abandoned dissertation (left in a box bound in rubber bands)—that all he wanted was to leave everything behind. A fresh start. A new place, a terra nova. An island.

But how would they live? Douglas protested.