Skyler did not go upstairs. She did not know why. Maybe because her hand hurt so much it made her stubborn. Maybe because the crab was gone, sinking into the creek where her mother used to drop chicken necks on strings. Maybe just because her father had said save me that seat, and she had saved it, she was standing right next to it, and if she went upstairs it would be empty.
"I said go."
And from the side gate, where the path came around the house from the driveway, a man's voice said, very quietly, "No. She stays."
Skyler turned. Her father was standing at the top of the deck stairs. He was still in his work clothes, khakis and a navy jacket with the pilot association patch on the shoulder, his hair flattened from the wind, and he was holding a thick manila envelope in one hand. She did not know how long he had been there. She did not know how much he had seen.
But she knew his face. And she had never seen it look like that before.
* * *
Five weeks earlier, at twenty past two on a Thursday morning, Grant Dawes had come home when nobody expected him.
A container ship he was supposed to take outbound had lost a generator at the Seagirt terminal and would not sail until noon, and rather than sleep on a cot at the Baltimore station with three other pilots snoring around him, he had driven the forty minutes home with the windows down to keep himself awake. He let himself in through the garage. He did not turn on any lights, because he did not want to wake Celeste, and he did not want to wake Skyler, and because after nineteen years of climbing ladders in the dark onto the slick steel flanks of ships, he moved quietly by habit, the way some men whistle.
He went upstairs. Skyler's door was open a crack, and there was light under it, a thin blue light like a phone screen. He pushed it gently, meaning to tell her to go to sleep.
She was sitting on the floor of her closet with her knees up and a plastic sandwich bag of dry cereal in her lap. She was eating it one piece at a time. A flashlight lay on the carpet beside her, turned down low, and in its glow he could see the open mouth of a rain boot, and inside it, a box of saltines, a jar of peanut butter with a spoon standing in it, two granola bars, a sleeve of crackers from a restaurant, and a dinner roll wrapped in a napkin.