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Josh’s was this: good kid, smart kid, steady kid. His mother had killed herself while he was still in elementary school, but Josh hadn’t derailed or self-destructed. In high school he studied hard enough to stay at the top of his class, he lettered in three sports, he was the senior class treasurer and did such a fine job running fund-raisers that he culled a budget surplus large enough to send the entire senior class to Boston the week before they graduated. Everyone thought he would become a doctor or a lawyer or a Wall Street banker, but Josh wanted to do something creative, something that would endure and have meaning. But nobody got it. Even Josh’s best friend, Zach Browning, had cocked his head and said, Do something creative? Like what, man? Paint someone’s portrait? Compose a fucking symphony?
    Josh had kept a journal for years, in a series of spiral-bound notebooks that he stashed under his bed like Playboy magazines. They contained the usual stuff—his thoughts, snippets of dreams, song lyrics, dialogue from movies, passages from novels, the scores from every football, basketball, and baseball game of his high school career, riffs on friends, girlfriends, teachers, and his father, memories of his mother, pages of descriptions of Nantucket and the places farther afield that he had traveled, ideas for stories he wanted to write someday. Now, thanks to three years under the tutelage (or “hypnosis,” as some would say) of Middlebury’s writer-in-residence, Chas Gorda, Josh knew that journal keeping was not only okay for a writer, but compulsory. In high school, it had seemed a little weird. Weren’t diaries for girls? His father had caught Josh a couple of times, opening Josh’s bedroom door without knocking the way he’d been wont to do in those days and asking, “What are you doing?”
    “Writing.”
    “Something for English?”
    “No. Just writing. For me.” It had sounded odd, and Josh had felt embarrassed. He started locking his bedroom door.
    Chas Gorda warned his students against being too “self-referential.” He was constantly reminding his class that no one wanted to read a short story about a college kid studying to be a writer. Josh understood this, but as he rolled into the town of ’Sconset with the mysterious briefcase next to him, anticipating interaction with people he barely knew who didn’t know him, he couldn’t help feeling that this was a moment he could someday mine. Maybe. Or maybe it would turn out to be a big nothing. The point, Chas Gorda had effectively hammered home, was that you had to be ready .
    Nantucket was the dullest place in America to grow up. There was no city, no shopping mall, no McDonald’s, no arcades, no diners, no clubs, no place to hang out unless you were into two-hundred-year-old Quaker meetinghouses. And yet, Josh had always had a soft spot for ’Sconset. It was a true village, with a Main Street canopied by tall, deciduous trees. The “town” of ’Sconset consisted of a post office, a package store that sold beer, wine, and used paperback books, two quaint cafes, and a market where Josh’s mother used to take him for an ice cream cone once a summer. There was an old casino that now served as a tennis club. ’Sconset was a place from another age, Josh had always thought. People said it was “old money,” but that just meant that a long, long time ago someone had the five hundred dollars and the good sense it took to buy a piece of land and a small house. The people who lived in ’Sconset had always lived in ’Sconset; they drove twenty-five-year-old Jeep Wagoneers, kids rode Radio Flyer tricycles down streets paved with white shells, and on a summer afternoon, the only three sounds you could hear were the waves of the town beach, the snap of the flag at the rotary, and the thwack of tennis balls from the club. It was like something precious from a postcard, but it was real.
    The address Scowling Sister had given Josh over the phone was