He read the assessment twice. It was nine pages long. It described, in calm clinical prose, a child he did not recognize. Persistent food-seeking behavior with deception. Theft from family members and peers. Manipulation of the noncustodial parent figure. Episodes of rage when food access is limited. Oppositional defiance toward stepmother. Possible elopement risk. The author recommended, with some urgency, a structured long-term residential placement with a strong therapeutic and behavioral component, and noted that the father, due to the demands of his profession, was largely unavailable and had been unable to observe the behaviors firsthand, but was supportive of the recommendation.
On page two it said: This assessment is based on a ninety-minute in-home observation and clinical interview with the student, conducted at the family residence on September 19, from approximately 4:00 to 5:30 p.m., as well as extensive consultation with the stepmother.
He went upstairs and got the photographs he had taken of Skyler's notebook, every page, on his phone, and found September.
Sep 19. Dad home!! We caught 6 crabs off the dock with chicken necks. I netted 4. Dad netted 2 and dropped one back in by accident and said a bad word. Crab soup, Mom's recipe from the 2014 notebook. Celeste was at Renée's. Good day.
He looked at that for a long time. Then he looked at his own work log, the one the pilot association kept, which recorded every assignment and every hour, and which would satisfy any court in the state. On September 19 he had been off. He had been at home, on his own dock, all afternoon, with his daughter, and Celeste had been gone. Nobody had observed anything. Nobody had interviewed anyone. There had been crabs and chicken necks and a dropped net and one bad word.
The emails in the folder were mostly logistics. Renée to Celeste: I've spoken to admissions at CHA, they have a bed opening mid-October. Celeste to Renée: Perfect. Renée: You'll need Grant's signature on the enrollment agreement and the delegation of parental authority, since he's legal guardian, there's no way around that. Celeste: I know. I'll handle Grant. Leave Grant to me. And then, a week later, Renée: I can bring the full packet to your party on the 10th and walk him through it. Men like to feel like they're making the decision. Let him ask questions, don't push. Transport can be scheduled for early on the 13th, best done before dawn, it minimizes resistance. And Celeste: You're a genius. I owe you a lot of wine.
At the very bottom of the thread was one more email from Renée, which seemed to have been sent to Celeste by mistake, or at least without much thought. It had been forwarded from someone at Cedar Hollow's admissions office, and it confirmed, in a single cheerful line, that upon the student's enrollment, Albright Family Transitions would receive the program's standard family-partner marketing fee of nine thousand dollars.
* * *
He did not confront her. That was the hardest part, those days.
Every instinct he had said to go upstairs, to wake her, to stand at the end of the bed and say I know. But he had been on bridges with captains who had that instinct, captains who wanted to do something when the ship began to sheer in a crosscurrent, to throw the wheel hard over, to ring for full astern. And he had seen what happened. A ship is not a car. It does not answer quickly. It answers late and all at once and in the wrong direction, and the more violently you move, the worse it gets. The thing to do was to make small, precise, steady corrections, and to have your plan made before you needed it.