She had run away once before, in high school. There had been no reason for it other than boredom, a standard-issue teenage restlessness, and a desire to see what other possibilities the world contained. Delilah had had a pleasant childhood and a less-pleasant-but-still-okay adolescence, growing up in South Haven, on the shores of Lake Michigan. Delilah’s father, Nico Ashby, was a real estate developer, responsible for the burgeoning suburban sprawl in the acreage just off the lake. He brought South Haven Taco Bell, Blockbuster, I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, Lucky Nail Salon, Subway, Stride Rite Shoes, and Mailboxes, Etc. He also had his hand in the bigger, uglier, more egregious development along Route 31 toward St. Joe’s—the Wal-Mart with its attendant Big Boy Diner, the Staples, the eighteen-theater Cineplex, the Applebee’s, the Borders. Nico Ashby and his wife and two daughters lived in a stunning Victorian house on the bluff that overlooked the town harbor and the South Haven Yacht Club (where Nico had been president for nine years). Nico was a local hero—a successful businessman, a philanthropist, a member of Rotary and the Lions Club, a model husband and father, a big, good-looking guy with a full head of dark hair, a bronze tan in three seasons, and a booming laugh. Nico Ashby—everyone knew him, everyone liked him.

Delilah’s mother, Connie Ashby, née Albertson, was short, dark-haired, trim, pretty, and obsessed with the following things: her person (exercising, hair, skin, nails, and clothes, clothes, clothes), her daughters (bake sales, Girl Scouts, summer camp, decorating for school dances), and her husband. She met Nico at Michigan State; he was a starting linebacker, she was a cheerleader, petite enough to serve as the top of the human pyramid, the cherry on the ice-cream sundae. And yes, these people really got married. They were beautiful and blessed, they were successful, they had gorgeous, healthy daughters.

Delilah was loved and encouraged. She was brilliant in school, a fact that made her parents proud, but Delilah’s precocity also allowed her the time and leeway to goof off. Delilah, as a teenager, was not beautiful. Her hair was too wild and curly; she wore braces for years. She had huge breasts and the rear end to counterbalance it. She was voluptuous, her mother said, but Connie Ashby weighed ninety pounds soaking wet (as did Delilah’s sister, Caitlin), and it was clear that having a voluptuous daughter perplexed her.

Boys did not love Delilah, but they liked her. Her best friends were all boys, the best-looking boys in her class—the athletes, the dope smokers, the clowns. They liked her whip-smart sense of humor, her sense of freedom. Delilah Ashby was not afraid of anyone.

She ran away in early May, when the periphery of the lake was blooming with dogwoods and azaleas. The Ashby family had just gotten back from a week in Fort Lauderdale, where Delilah had looked upon the university students on spring break with envy. Freedom! She dreamed of a highway with no one on it, a deserted stretch of beach, an endless ribbon of blue sea, a grid of city blocks where no one knew her name and no one expected her to show up for lacrosse practice or memorize theorems or sit down to dinner at six and contribute to the conversation. Delilah itched, she could not sleep, the house was suffocating her. School and the kids in it—even Dean Markbury, whom she loved with the ferocity of a lion—were slowly killing her with their predictable sameness. She had to get out.

She needed money. She had saved seven hundred dollars from baby-sitting, and over the course of four days she stole. She stole from her father’s wallet, from her mother’s stash for tipping the manicurist, from petty cash in the kitchen drawer where the family grabbed five or ten dollars for the offering basket at church. She stockpiled a thousand dollars. She estimated it would last her three weeks.

She left in the middle of the night on her bike. In her backpack was the money, two bottles of water, an extra pair of jeans, a bra, five pairs of underwear, three tissue-thin T-shirts, her lacrosse workout clothes, sunglasses, flip-flops, and a box of Pop-Tarts. It was all she could ever imagine needing.

She had left a note on the kitchen table in the spot where members of her family normally left notes for one another. She had given the note careful thought. It said, See ya! Delilah wanted her parents to know that a) she had not been abducted, but rather was walking away from this nice life of her own volition, and b) she was not leaving in anger, but rather in the spirit of self-discovery. “See ya!” would also, hopefully, keep her mother from completely losing her mind, implying as it did that mother and daughter would set eyes on each other again. Delilah, although self-centered and self-absorbed, realized that what she was doing would destroy her parents as well as thirteen-year-old Caitlin, who worshipped her. (Delilah had peeked in on Caitlin before she left. Caitlin was breathing heavily through her orthodontic headgear. The sight of her and the knowledge of Caitlin’s deep impending sorrow almost kept Delilah from going.) But Delilah was infected with the desire to be FREE, and once she was biking along the Blue Star Highway, her spirit soared. She was headed to Saugatuck, where she would catch a bus to Grand Rapids, and in Grand Rapids she would catch the bus to New York, where she would catch the Chinatown bus to Boston, and in Boston she would take the Plymouth & Brockton line to Hyannis. From Hyannis she would ride the ferry to Nantucket Island, a destination she had discovered in the pages of National Geographic, which she read in the high school library while she was supposed to be researching a paper on Blaise Pascal. She stumbled across the article about Nantucket by accident, but she was captivated by the way it looked—all quaint and historic and New Englandy. It looked like home.