That first afternoon, he and Douglas wandered up the path to the main house: a Greek Revival, with Gothic touches added later. The Realtor had left them keys. The house was chill, echoey, redolent of mice. They wandered each enormous room, Douglas reluctant, skeptical (though with a slight mercurial look), Kevin trying to keep himself from ecstatics. The carpets smelled of sea damp. There was sand on the floor, a library with warped shelves, old books with gilt edges and pages pocked with mold (they’d have to be spread in the sun). A Persian rug lay rotting on the parquet. A black Baldwin upright, scandalously out of tune. Plaster crumbled everywhere. Paint blistered. Could they possibly restore the place to its grandeur? The lightning rods beaded with cobalt porcelain balls, the widow’s walk, the Doric columns? Yes, it was tremendous work. But even Douglas had to admit there was something magical about the spot: the dramatic drop to the ocean, the lime green of the lawn in early June, the Prussian blue of the sea. To wake to that each morning, Kevin thought, he’d feel alive again after all those years in a lightless apartment on Gansevoort Street.

The first few seasons on Trachis were not easy. There were problems with the contractors, the plumbing, the dry rot. They had trouble finding help; the housekeepers kept quitting. The islanders themselves were not particularly welcoming. Neither Douglas nor Kevin was a Maritimer. Worse yet, they were Lower Americans—the worst kinds of carpetbaggers. Hadn’t Kevin overheard Bunty Phillips, the island constable, once say as much, publicly, at a town meeting?

Yet slowly, incrementally, year by year, they were, if not entirely embraced, at least accepted. When people drove past Trachis Inn now off the Peninsular Road, they caught sight of the yellow-painted main house, the black shutters, the spruces and antique hollyhocks out front. It looked so much better than before, when the place had lain in ruins—they had to concede that much. For the main house was one of the island’s few historic buildings, had belonged to Ezra Trachis himself, a sea captain. His wealth, they said, was earned in the opium trade.

Kevin unlatched the gate and entered the garden. An orange moon drifted hazily in the east. He found the patch of dill, the heads lush, lacy, fragrant in the moonlight. He was making a gravlax from a salmon he’d bought that morning straight off Government Dock. Nova Scotia salmon, the freshest possible. He needed several bunches of dill and some juniper berries for the recipe. Down at the cottages, lights twinkled through trees. Oscar barked and loped on the lawn, nose to ground, the sea behind; he’d caught the scent of rabbits.