She looked up at him. She did not cry or jump or try to hide anything. She just went very still, the way her mother used to when she was thinking, and that was what he would remember afterward, more than anything else. Not that she was frightened. That she was calculating. His eleven-year-old daughter, at two in the morning, looking at him the way a deckhand on a foreign ship looks at a customs officer, trying to work out how much trouble this was going to be.
"Hey, bug," he said. "You hungry?"
She nodded.
"Come on downstairs. I'll make you eggs."
He saw her eyes go to the door, and past it, down the hallway toward the room where Celeste was sleeping. "It's okay," he said. "It's me. Come on."
But the eggs were the first thing that went wrong, because when he opened the refrigerator there were eggs, a whole carton, and when he took them out Skyler said in a small fast voice, "Those aren't mine," and he laughed, because he thought it was a joke, and she did not laugh. And then he went to the pantry for bread, and found the padlock, and stood looking at it for a long moment, and remembered that he had agreed to it. He had stood in his own bedroom while his wife explained, in a soft and sensible voice, why it was necessary, and he had said okay.
He did not know the combination. He had never asked.
He made her scrambled eggs and toast from the bread in the freezer, and she ate four eggs and three pieces of toast, and he sat across from her at the island and watched her do it and felt something cold begin to move in his chest, slowly, like a ship turning in a narrow channel, so slowly you did not notice it was happening until the shore was in a different place.
"Sky," he said. "Talk to me. What's going on?"
She looked at her plate. "Nothing."