He felt it go into him like a cold blade.
"I didn't know," he said. "I didn't know, Sky. I swear to you. I agreed to the lock because she told me you were—" He stopped. He did not want to say it. "I didn't know you were hungry. I should have known. That's on me. But I didn't."
She did not answer. She did not look at him. And he understood that saying it was not enough, that words were cheap, that she had heard a lot of words from a lot of adults in the last two years and had learned to judge them by what happened afterward, the way you judge a weather forecast. He did not blame her. He would have done the same.
That night, when he went up to bed, Celeste was in the bath, and there was something on his pillow.
It was a composition notebook, the black-and-white marbled kind, with the corners worn soft. On the cover, in his daughter's handwriting, in black marker, were three words: What We Had.
He knew those words. He sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.
June had kept notebooks. Every year of their marriage, one notebook, the same marbled kind, and she wrote down every meal she cooked and every meal they ate out and every meal someone brought them, the date and the dish and who was there and sometimes a line about it, a little review, a joke. Crab cakes, too much bread in them, my fault. Grant says the risotto tastes like wallpaper paste, Grant is sleeping on the boat. Sky ate her first oyster and made a face like a gargoyle and then asked for another. She had been a food writer, for the Capital and then for a magazine in Baltimore, and she said the notebooks were where the real writing happened, the rest was just typing it up. There were fourteen of them in a box in the attic. She had called them all the same thing. What We Had. Because, she said, at the end of your life, that's what it is. That's the whole story. What you had, and who you had it with.
He opened Skyler's notebook.
It began in January. The first entry, in her careful rounded hand, said: Jan 3. Dad home. Pot roast. Everybody at table. Dad told the story about the captain with the parrot. Good.
The second entry said: Jan 6. Dad away. C had sushi from Joss. Me: macaroni. She said sushi is for adults.