"I can try to set it up," Anderson said. "He's already having you followed. He might actually like the chance to check in face-to-face."

"I'll take a ferry over tonight, provided they have space. If you get me that interview, I'll have a pretty full dance card. I'm attending Brooke Bishop's funeral tomorrow."

"At Julia's invitation?" he said.

"Yes."

There was a little longer silence this time. "Look, we go back a long way, right?"

I knew where he was headed. "You don't have to say it."

"I'm just going to tell you the way it is: You can't touch her."

"I haven't," I said.

"You haven't and you won't?"

I hesitated.

"Listen to me," Anderson said. "Whether you mess around with married women is your own business. I'm not about to give you any lectures on morality."

"Good."

"You can't touch her because it contaminates the case. You can't see clearly from the inside of anything, if you know what I mean."

I knew exactly what he meant. Crossing personal boundaries in professional relationships is always ill-advised. As a psychiatrist, it's especially unethical. But my attraction to Julia was blurring all those lines. I didn't feel I could honestly make any promises or predictions about where my relationship with her was headed. "You're right," was all I told Anderson.

"And…"

"And I'll try to be on that ferry I mentioned."

"You're playing with fire, Frank."

"I hear you."

He let out a heavy sigh. "Call me when you hit the island."

"Will do."

I packed light, but then realized I was traveling a little too light, given the special attention Darwin Bishop was paying me. I walked over to the bed, reached down to the bed frame, and grabbed my Browning Baby pistol. I tucked it in my front pocket. It had been a long time since I'd needed to carry, but it was that time again.

I walked to the kitchen next. I looked up at the double doors of the cabinet over the refrigerator. I hadn't opened those doors for more than two years. But I hadn't emptied the cabinet, either. A collection of single malt scotches stood inside, waiting for a moment like this one, when some sort of trouble in the world would become my trouble again. There was a flask in the cabinet, too-a well-worn, sterling silver one with "FGC" engraved, front and center. Frank Galvin Clevenger. I was never one for monograms, but Galvin had been my father's first name, and it had seemed fitting that I include the "G" on a vessel that contained the spore of the illness we shared.

I reached up and opened the doors. I took down the flask and a bottle of twenty-year-old Glenlivet. I twisted the cap off each. Then, in a ritual that had sometimes reminded me of a transfusion, sometimes of bloodletting, I poured a thin stream of scotch from bottle to flask, listening to the familiar song of the liquid splashing into the hollow vessel. It was a deep, throaty tune at first and something more shrill toward the end. I remembered it with dread and-more ominous for me-nostalgia.

I put the bottle back in the cabinet and the flask in my back pocket. And I walked out of the loft that way, on a journey that would take me, in equal measure, into my future and into my past.

I planned to take the 7:00 p.m. ferry out of Hyannis and leave my truck in the lot there. But when the clerk at Steamship Authority told me a car reservation had opened up (something of a miracle in June), I happily paid the $202 and drove aboard.

North Anderson had reached me on my cell phone and offered me the guestroom at his house, but I had passed, not wanting to impose on him or his wife, Tina. Playing hostess, with no notice, when you're six months pregnant can't be much fun. I also preferred having my own base to work from. I gave Anderson my ETA and found a vacancy at the Breakers, part of the White Elephant hotel complex on Easton Street, which runs along the north side of Nantucket Harbor.

I napped for about an hour in my truck, then woke up and stepped onto the deck to get some air. It wasn't quite sixty degrees, chilly for late June. I stood near the stern, breathing in the mist and watching the ship's white cotton wake. I wondered whether Billy had made the same trip earlier. I imagined him laying low and stealing onto the island unseen or unrecognized, a cruel irony for a boy whose identity-including his biological parents, his native land, his first language, and his name-had already been stripped from him. Now survival required burying the rest of himself, at least temporarily. If that felt too much like dying, he might decide to make it official. Strangely, suicide is sometimes a person's way of taking control-the soul's last-ditch effort to free itself from overwhelming earthly influences.

I thought back to my first psychotherapy session with Dr. James. I'd been talking five or ten minutes about a nurse I was romancing. She wanted a commitment, I didn't feel ready to make one, and that seemed to mean I was going to lose her. Looking back on it, the whole affair was hopeless; I was nowhere near ready for a real relationship.

James stopped me midsentence. "We don't have a lot of time together," he said. "We shouldn't waste it talking about some conquest of yours. May I ask you a specific question, so we can begin, in earnest?"

I stopped jawing and nodded my head.

"When was the first time," he said, "that you thought of killing yourself?"

I sat there, stunned, looking at the gnomish, eighty-one-year-old man seated across from me, wearing a seersucker suit and two silver and turquoise cuff bracelets. "When was the first time I thought of killing myself?" I echoed.

He looked at his watch. Then he winked at me and smiled warmly, even lovingly. "C'mon, Frank," he said. "Give it up. What have you got to lose?"

And I did. Just like that. Such were the man's gifts. I told him that the first time I thought of ending it all was when I was nine years old. I had taken a beating from my father, and I had gone upstairs to my room and thrown a pair of jeans, my baseball glove, and a favorite model airplane into a duffel bag. Then I had walked downstairs, stopping in the tiny foyer outside the kitchen. A short staircase led to the front door.

My father saw me and walked out of the kitchen. "Going somewhere?" he asked.

I summoned all the nerve I could and stared up at him. "Good-bye," I said.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said.

"Don't look for me," I said, shaking with fear. "I'm not coming back." Translation: Tell me you're sorry, and that you want me to stay, and that everything will be different if I do.

He laughed at me. "So, go," he said. "You want to be a big shot? You don't want to live here? Take off." He walked back into the kitchen.

I glanced at my mother, cooking dinner. All the years she had stood idly by as my father meted out his brutality could have been overshadowed if she had had enough courage to come to me at that moment. But she didn't make a move, didn't say a word.

In truth, I had nowhere to go. I was nine. I had never felt as helpless. I dropped my suitcase, ran to my room, and started to cry. And I came up with a plan to wait until my parents were asleep, then use my father's belt as a noose to hang myself from a hook on the bathroom door.

Thinking about two things had kept me on the planet. The first was my best friend, Anthony, who sat behind me in homeroom and had an uncanny ability to finish my sentences. The second was my two-year-old turtle, Seymour, who surely would perish if left alone with my mother and father.

I wiped the mist from my face and took a deep breath of Atlantic air. The night seemed even chillier than before. I reached into my pocket and took out my flask. I unscrewed the cap, brought the metal to my lips, and swallowed a mouthful.