"That's certainly possible," Ms. Okafor said, after a moment, in her careful voice. "Children grieve in all kinds of ways. But I'll tell you what I'd tell any parent. When a child hides food because of something emotional, the food isn't really the point, and you see it in other places too, in behavior, in schoolwork, in friendships. Skyler isn't struggling in any of those places. She's struggling in exactly one. And the lunch account. The lunch account is something you could check."
"Celeste handles the school accounts."
"Yes," said Ms. Okafor. "I've emailed her about it three times."
That evening he logged in to the school's payment portal for the first time in his life. It took him twenty minutes to reset the password. The account had not been funded since the previous spring. There were three automated low-balance notices sitting in a mailbox he had never looked at, and three emails from Ms. Okafor, each one forwarded to him, he saw now, by the school system's software, and each one marked as read on Celeste's laptop and filed in a folder labeled School Misc.
He put two hundred dollars in the account. Then he called Ms. Okafor back and asked whether the school had a breakfast program, and whether Skyler could start getting breakfast in her office, every morning, and whether that could stay between the two of them for now.
"It can," she said. "For now." And then, more gently: "I'm glad you called back, Mr. Dawes. A lot of parents don't."
* * *
He took Skyler to her checkup himself.
Celeste had always handled the pediatrician too. She had scheduled this one for a Thursday, when he would normally be on the bay, but he traded shifts with a pilot named Tom Brannigan who owed him a favor from a fog night two winters back, and he told Celeste he would take Skyler, that it would be nice, father-daughter time. Celeste said that was sweet. She said, "Make sure you mention the food thing to Dr. Patel. She should have it in the chart." He said he would.
Dr. Patel had been Skyler's doctor since she was born. She was a small, quick, gray-haired woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had come to June's funeral, and Grant had not seen her since. She weighed Skyler and measured her and looked in her ears, and then she sat down at the computer and pulled up a chart with curving colored lines, and she was quiet for a long time.