Kevin remembered his face when he told him his idea for an inn. And what exactly, Douglas inquired, one hand on hip, made him capable of running an inn?

Nothing, Kevin shrugged. But he’d cared for so many sick people for the last eight years, how much harder could it be looking after perfectly healthy ones on holiday?

Besides, Kevin added, he liked the ring of the word “innkeeper.” It sounded so Chaucerian.

In the end Douglas consented; what else was he to do? He had no real job to speak of, only the occasional work as a personal trainer. Most of the important decisions in the last few years he’d ceded to Kevin, not because Kevin was twelve years his senior—and a bit more experienced—but because Douglas was too lethargic to make up his mind. So when it came to the big move, Douglas went along, more out of laziness than any real conviction that living on an isolated island suited his temperament or lifestyle.

The property came with eleven acres, one hundred feet of ocean frontage, a beach of crushed pink shells. Broken crockery, Kevin called it, sifting sand through his fingers the first afternoon they visited, for the beach sand looked like nothing more than teacups and saucers that had been tumbled ceaselessly by the tide. How appropriate to move there then, Kevin mused, among the pulverized dishes, the shards of scallop shells, for his life up until that point in New York City had seemed the tail end of an imaginary tea party where all the guests were now gone. That June afternoon, looking up at the house on the bluff, Kevin knew this was the place he’d live for the rest of his life. Trachis. An island ringed by emerald. Black glacial boulders. Fifteen miles from the mainland. Twenty from the Scotian Shelf. So what if, two months earlier, he’d never even heard of the place?