"Then don't. Hadley Moss files on Monday." He looked at her steadily. "But I want you to understand one thing before you decide. I'm not doing this to punish you. I don't care enough about you anymore to want to punish you. I'm doing it because the polite version is the one where my daughter never has to sit in a courtroom and explain to a stranger what ketchup packets taste like for dinner. That's the only reason it's there. If you make me use the other one, I will. I won't think twice."
Celeste stared at him. For a moment, something moved behind her face, something that might have been fear, or rage, or, very far down, a flicker of an older and more ordinary shame. Then it closed over.
"You'll regret this," she said. "She'll ruin your life. You'll see."
She picked up her phone from the table. She did not pick up the papers. She walked into the house, and they heard her heels on the stairs, and a door, and then nothing. An hour later a friend from tennis pulled into the driveway, and Celeste came down with a rolling suitcase and got into the car without looking back.
Four days later, a lawyer Grant had never heard of called Hadley Moss and said his client had reviewed the draft of the fault complaint and would be signing the settlement agreement as written. Celeste signed it on a Thursday afternoon in an office in Severna Park, with the same little flourish, like an autograph. She was out of the house in nineteen days. She did it while Grant and Skyler were away, with movers, on a morning he had told Hadley about in advance, so that nobody had to see anybody. She took everything she had brought and everything the prenup said she could, and the gray stone island stayed where it was because it was bolted to the floor.
She left the padlock on the pantry door. But by then it did not matter, because it was already cut in two.
* * *
He cut it that first night, after the guests were gone and Celeste had driven away and the caterers had packed their van and gone back over the bridge to Kent Island.
He went down to the boat shed at the bottom of the lawn and came back with the bolt cutters he used on rusty shackles, and he stood in front of the pantry door with Skyler beside him, and he said, "You want to do it?"
She looked at the lock, and then at him, and then she shook her head. "You do it," she said. "It was your idea."