"Lose what?"
She thought about it. "You lose and you have to admit I'm faster. Out loud. To Mr. Brannigan."
"That's cruel."
"Those are the rules," she said.
* * *
There were many more nights after that, most of them ordinary, which was the point.
It did not get better all at once. That was the thing nobody told you, Grant learned, any more than they told you about the sound live crabs made in a basket. It got better in small steady corrections, a degree at a time, the way you bring a ship around. For the first month, Skyler still kept a sleeve of crackers inside a boot in her closet. He knew because he checked, once, when she was at school, and then he made himself stop checking, because checking was its own kind of lock. In the second month, he noticed the crackers had gone stale and she had not replaced them. He did not say anything. In the third month the boot was just a boot.
Dr. Patel saw her again in November. She was up two and a half pounds. Dr. Patel showed Grant the screen and the line on the chart had stopped falling and begun, very slightly, to bend back up, and she touched it with one finger and said, "That's what I like to see," and then she took off her reading glasses and gave Skyler a sticker anyway, a good one, a crab in sunglasses. Dr. Patel also gave them the name of a counselor, a real one, a soft-spoken man in Edgewater who had a dog in his office and specialized in children who had lost a parent, and Skyler went every Wednesday after school and came home and did not talk about it much, which the counselor said was fine, and which Grant learned to be fine with too.
Ms. Okafor called Grant into her office in October and handed him a sealed envelope that contained Renée Albright's assessment and Renée Albright's written withdrawal of it, and told him that the assessment had been removed from Skyler's school record and that she had personally fed the original through the shredder. "I want you to know I enjoyed that," Ms. Okafor said, in her careful formal voice. "I don't usually enjoy things at work. I enjoyed that very much." Skyler still went to her office some mornings, but now she brought a muffin from home, and sometimes she brought two, and left one on Ms. Okafor's desk.
The refund came, three thousand five hundred dollars, wired on a Monday, exactly as promised. Hadley Moss forwarded Renée's signed declaration to the Idaho licensing board anyway, with a cover letter, because, as she told Grant on the phone, "she signed a true statement, and true statements belong in the record. That's not a threat. That's just housekeeping." In the spring, a reporter from a newspaper in Boise published a long article about Cedar Hollow Ascent and its marketing fees. Renée's name was on the fourth page. Grant read it once and did not keep it.