Renée Albright looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked across the table at Celeste. It was a very short look, and Grant, who had spent nineteen years reading the faces of men who had something to hide from the coast guard, understood it perfectly. It was the look of someone recalculating which side of a ledger she was on.
"Renée," Celeste said, very low. "Don't."
"You told me he was on board." Renée's voice had changed. The softness had gone out of it; it was flat and quick and practical. "You told me he'd agreed to all of it. You told me she'd hit you. You said she was violent, you said she'd threatened you with a knife—"
"I never said a knife."
"You said a knife, Celeste. In August. At the Wine Bar on Main Street. You said you were afraid of her." Renée looked down the table at Skyler, at the small girl in the too-tight blue dress holding her red hand against her chest, as if seeing her for the first time. Which, Grant supposed, she was. "She's tiny," Renée said, almost to herself. "She weighs nothing."
"You never checked," Grant said. "That was your whole job. And you never checked."
Renée picked up the pen. She read the declaration through, all three pages, quickly, her lips moving very slightly, the way some people read contracts. Then she signed it in three places where the yellow flags were, and initialed the bottom of each page, and dated it, and pushed it back across the brown paper toward him without a word. She closed her leather folder. She stood up, and put her bag on her shoulder, and walked to the deck stairs, and at the top of them she stopped and turned around.
"I'll have the refund wired on Monday," she said, to nobody in particular. And then she was gone, down through the hydrangeas, and a moment later they all heard a car door, and an engine, and gravel.
* * *
The party did not so much end as evaporate.