The year is 2013.

The summer air in suburban Boston hung heavy with the hum of sprinklers and the distant whine of cicadas, wrapping the quiet town in a kind of lazy stillness. Neat rows of houses lined the curved streets, each one nearly identical — white fences, trimmed lawns, mailboxes that hadn’t seen anything more exciting than bills in years.

It was the kind of place where nothing unexpected ever happened, where Friday nights meant backyard barbecues and kids on bikes traced the same loops around cul-de-sacs they’d ridden since they were five. Here, dreams tended to shrink to fit the town that held them, until they were small enough to ignore. Not for Zach, though.

Under that small-town quiet was a restless hum, the kind that buzzes beneath fluorescent lights in a grocery store or in the backseat of a car headed nowhere. It lived in the space between streetlights and screen doors, in the soft glow of TV reruns and the weight of everyone else’s plans — college, jobs, the slow, steady march toward adulthood. Somewhere in that sameness, a camera lens blinked awake, the record light flickering red against the late-summer dusk.