He saw the crab bounce and roll and drop into the water.
And he heard everything Celeste said after, every word of it, about family and guests and lying and sneaking, and he saw nobody move, not one adult on that deck, and he saw Renée Albright open her soft leather folder and begin to take notes.
He would think about it afterward, and he would never be quite sure, but he believed that the decision to break his promise to Hadley Moss was not really a decision at all. It was more like what happened when a ship had been slowly turning in a channel for a long time, and then the bow finally came around, and you felt it, the whole enormous weight of the thing swinging onto its new heading, and there was nothing left to do but let it go.
"No," he said. "She stays."
* * *
Celeste turned. For one half second her face was a blank, a white page. Then it rearranged itself, swiftly and expertly, into relief.
"Grant. Oh, thank God." She came toward him across the deck, her hands out, her voice dropping into that soft tired register, the one she used for him. "I'm so sorry you had to see that. I didn't want you to walk in on it. She's been impossible all day, she was sneaking food from the kitchen all morning, and I asked her nicely, I asked her so many times—"
He walked past her. He did not touch her. He did not look at her. He went straight up the deck to the end of the crab table where Skyler was standing with her hand held against her chest, and he knelt down in front of her on the boards in his work khakis and said, "Let me see."
She held it out. The back of her hand was red, an angry spreading red, with the clear marks of fingers across the knuckles.
He looked at it for a while. Nobody on the deck said a word. Somewhere at the end of the dock, the oyster man had stopped shucking.