He read every page. There were two hundred and fourteen entries. At the bottom of some of them she had drawn small pictures, the way her mother used to, a crab, a sailboat, a slice of pie. There were no pictures after August.
When Celeste came out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and lavender, he had put the notebook inside his jacket on the chair and was lying in bed with the light off, facing the wall. She said, "How was the doctor?" and he said, "Fine. She's fine. Healthy," and he listened to Celeste get into bed and turn off her lamp and sigh in the comfortable way of someone with nothing on their conscience, and he lay there in the dark with his eyes open until the sky outside began to go gray over the creek.
He did not know yet what he was going to do. But he knew, by morning, that he was going to do it carefully. He had been a pilot for nineteen years. He knew what happened when you made a sudden turn in a narrow channel with the tide running against you. You put the ship on the bank. You did not get a second try. So you read the water first. You checked the charts. You waited for slack tide. And then you moved, all at once, and you did not stop.
Before he left for the pilot station, he opened the notebook to the first blank page at the back and drew a crab in blue ink, not very well, and wrote beneath it the only thing he could think of that was both true and safe. Then he slid it under her door.
* * *
The first thing he checked was the money, because money was the one thing in his house that he understood and that kept records of itself.
He had added Celeste to his credit card the month they married. He paid the bill every month without reading it, the way he had paid it when June was alive, because June had done the same thing and there had never been any reason to look. Now he sat at the desk in the little room off the garage that he used as an office, with the door locked, and went through eighteen months of statements line by line. Most of it was what he expected. Groceries, though less than he would have guessed for a family of three. The tennis club. A spa in Annapolis twice a month. Restaurants on the nights he was away, a lot of them, for two or three or six people. Clothes. The kitchen renovation, which he remembered. And then, on the sixteenth of August, a charge for three thousand five hundred dollars to something called Albright Family Transitions LLC.
The company had a website. It was tasteful and sparse, all soft greens and photographs of mountains, teenagers in hiking boots silhouetted against sunsets. When your family is in crisis, you need a guide who has walked this road. Renée Albright, M.A., had twenty years of experience helping families find the right therapeutic placement for struggling children and adolescents. She worked with a carefully selected network of residential programs, wilderness programs, and therapeutic boarding schools across the Mountain West. She offered comprehensive in-home assessments. She offered transport coordination. She offered peace of mind.
Celeste's laptop was not locked. She had never in her life imagined that anyone would look at it. He told himself, as he opened it on the kitchen island at one in the morning while she slept upstairs, that he was not proud of this, and that he would do it again a hundred times. He did not need to look far. There was a folder on the desktop called Fall Plans. In it were a brochure, an intake packet, a dozen emails, and a document titled Clinical Assessment, Skyler J. Dawes, prepared by Renée Albright, M.A.
The brochure was for a place called Cedar Hollow Ascent, in the high desert of eastern Idaho. Twelve-month minimum stay. Students lived in a lodge and in a backcountry phase in tents. Communication with family was earned through progression in the program, beginning with supervised letters after the first sixty days. There was a photograph of a girl about Skyler's age sitting by a campfire with a blanket over her shoulders, looking at the flames, and the caption beneath it said, Finding her way back.