Roxie yawned again. “And yet you still come home hungry.” She nodded at the Tupperware in his lap.

Keats grunted. “Bottomless pit.”

“Anyway,” Roxie said, her head lolling sleepily, “I need to get to bed. I’m trying to get a long run in early tomorrow.”

After Roxie had left the room, Keats took his lasagna to the back window of their apartment, overlooking the ocean, and he stood there by himself, noticing the quiet corrugations of low tide and the wide beach stippled with large and small footprints. The brush decorating the landscape was still an awful mess since the storm that afternoon—big patches of it tangled in the fencing, brambles bundled together like tumbleweed, tough vines angled weirdly upright like broken black skeletons.

The cricket had gone silent for a minute or two, but now it started up again, purring and carrying on like a lovesick little buzz saw.

Roxie was fifteen years old when she first set foot on Fripp Island.

Vacationing with her parents on an exclusive and exotic island was no more or less miserable than living under the same roof with them in Boston for the rest of the year. Her mother was a drunk, and her father was a violent rageaholic. Both of her parents came from money, met at prep school, married at twenty-one. Roxie’s father became a successful hedge-funder, and her mother worked several volunteer shifts a week in the accounting office of the Archdiocese of Boston. Roxie’s parents despised each other and were dangerously addicted to their own dramas. Fights culminating in murderous threats and broken glassware were a regular occurrence. Roxie envied her classmates whose parents had gotten divorced and lived separately almost as much as she envied her classmates whose parents were happily married.

Keats’s mother died of cancer when Keats was very young—he had no memory of her. His father, Joe Firestone, was the go-to handyman on Fripp Island, where he did jobs for half the homeowners. He worked hard and eventually saved enough money to afford a small, ramshackle cottage on the island, which smelled powerfully of cat piss and only had an outdoor shower. But after commuting to and from Beaufort for many years, actually living on the island was a dream come true.

Keats had been going to the public school in Beaufort, which was in walking distance from their home prior to the move, and he was working with his father only on the weekends. But once Joe bought the place on the island, it was wildly inconvenient for him to drive his fourteen-year-old son to school every morning, as no buses came to Fripp Island for pickups. For his whole life, Keats’s only ambition was to work for his father; he had no desire to pursue anything outside of the family business. So one week into his eighth-grade year, he begged his father to allow him to drop out of school and work full time as Joe’s right-hand guy. Joe agreed to this, on the condition that Keats would study from home to pass the GED, so that he would have the diploma should he need it down the line.