In those two weeks he traded every shift he could with every pilot who owed him anything, so that he was home five nights out of seven instead of three, and he told Celeste it was the rotation. He made dinner. He made big dinners, roast chicken and spaghetti and pot roast, on purpose, and he made Skyler a second plate every night and put it in the freezer in foil with her name on it in marker, and when Celeste asked what that was about he said he was meal-prepping, he'd seen a thing about it online, and she rolled her eyes and let it go. Ms. Okafor gave Skyler breakfast every morning. The lunch account stayed full.
And he did not tell Skyler what he was doing. That was Hadley Moss's advice too, and he hated it, and he followed it, because she was right. A child should not have to carry a secret like that in a house like that. She should not have to sit across from Celeste at breakfast holding it in her chest. So he drew a crab in a notebook and wrote Hold on, Sky, and hoped she would understand that it meant everything he could not yet say.
He saw her watching him. He saw her watching the extra plates in the freezer and the full lunch account and the father who was suddenly home for dinner, and he saw her not trusting it, not yet, the way you don't trust the first warm day in March. He did not blame her for that either.
He also heard Celeste, once, on the phone on the back deck, when she thought he was in the shower. "No, he's fine. He's been weird lately, cooking a lot, I think it's a midlife thing. He'll sign. He always does what I tell him if I tell it right." A pause, a laugh. "Honestly, once she's out West for a year, it'll finally feel like my house. I'm going to turn that room into an office. He'll be sad for a week, and then he'll be relieved. Men always are. They just can't say it."
He stood in the dark hallway inside the French doors, with the water running in the shower upstairs where he had left it, and listened to his wife laugh, and he thought of June's name scratched into the wood at the end of the dock.
* * *
On the night of the party, the ship was late.
It was not his fault and there was nothing he could do about it. A car carrier coming up from the capes had to wait at anchor off Annapolis for a berth to clear, and he sat on her bridge for three hours watching the lights of his own town glitter across the water, two miles away, and texted his daughter a crab, and could not get off. When he finally put her alongside at Sparrows Point and climbed down onto the dock it was a quarter past five, and he drove south on the beltway with the manila envelope on the seat beside him, the one Hadley Moss had given him two days earlier, two sets of documents in two clipped stacks, each one flagged with little yellow tabs where the signatures went.
He parked behind the caterer's van and came around the side of the house on the path through the hydrangeas. He could hear the party before he could see it. Music, laughter, the crack of mallets on shells. He came through the side gate and stopped at the foot of the deck stairs, looking up through the slats, and he saw his daughter standing at the end of the crab table in a blue dress that was too small for her, reaching out to pick up a crab, carefully, with two fingers, the way her mother had taught her.
He saw Celeste cross the deck. He saw her hand come down. He heard the crack.