"Good." Celeste smoothed her dress. Then, as she turned to go back inside, she said over her shoulder, quite lightly, the way you would mention the weather: "And Renée is coming. You remember Renée. She's very excited to finally meet you properly."
Skyler did not remember Renée. But something in the way Celeste said the name made the skin on her arms tighten, the way it did when a storm was coming up the bay and the air changed before anyone could see the clouds.
* * *
Her father did not come home at four. He texted at four-ten: Ship was late off the anchorage. Getting off at Sparrows Point now. Driving straight there. Tell Celeste sorry. Be there by six, six-thirty latest. Save me that seat. Then, a moment later, a picture of a crab with its claws up, the emoji he always used, which had become their private signal for I'm thinking of you.
Skyler sent back a crab. She looked at the little picture for a while afterward. Three weeks ago she had given her father something, left it on his pillow without a word, and the next morning it had come back to her, slid under her bedroom door, with nothing written in it but a crab drawn in blue ink on the last page and three words underneath: Hold on, Sky. She had not known what that meant. She still did not. Nothing had changed at home, not that she could see, except that the school had suddenly started giving her breakfast in the counselor's office every morning and nobody would tell her who had arranged it.
Then she put on the blue thing, which was a dress Celeste had bought her for the wedding two years ago, which was now too short in the arms and tight across the back, and she went downstairs.
The guests began arriving at five. Skyler stood by the French doors to the deck and said hello, as instructed, to a lot of people who called her "sweetheart" and did not ask her anything else. The tennis women. A couple from Celeste's old job at a real estate office in Severna Park. A man named Phil who was apparently a harbor commissioner, or wanted to be one. A loud younger couple who had a boat. They all went out onto the deck and got drinks and stood near the oysters, and the sun came down slow and gold over the creek, and the caterers carried the first steaming trays of crabs to the long tables and dumped them out onto the brown paper in great red heaps that smelled like Old Bay and vinegar and salt and the whole summer of every year Skyler had been alive.
She could not help it. She went toward them. She did not even decide to. Her stomach decided, and her feet followed.
Renée arrived at five-forty. Skyler noticed her because Celeste noticed her, crossing the deck with both hands out, saying "You came!" in a voice an octave higher than usual. Renée was a slim, tanned woman in a linen jacket and expensive glasses, carrying a soft leather folder under one arm, and she hugged Celeste and then turned and looked straight across the deck at Skyler, and smiled. It was a professional smile. It was the kind of smile a nurse gives you before a shot.
"So this is our girl," Renée said.