"You're eating out of a boot."
"Celeste says it's a grief thing," Skyler said, without looking up. "She says I have a disorder."
He waited, but that was all she would say. When she finished, she washed her own plate and dried it and put it away, exactly where it went, and wiped the counter, and then she went back upstairs, and he heard her close the closet door.
* * *
In the morning he talked to Celeste, and Celeste was ready.
That was the thing he would think about later, too, when he went back over it, the way pilots go back over a bad transit and try to see where the current first took hold. She was not surprised. She was not defensive. She sat on the edge of their bed in her robe with a cup of coffee and listened to him describe the closet, and the boot, and the eggs, and she nodded slowly and closed her eyes and said, "I know. I know. I didn't want to tell you how bad it had gotten, because you're gone so much and you worry, and I thought I could handle it."
"Handle what?"
"She steals, Grant. She takes food from the kitchen in the middle of the night. She takes it from school. She lies about what she's eaten. I'll make her a full dinner and she'll throw half of it in the trash when I'm not looking and then tell you she's starving." She put her coffee down and took his hand. "It's a known thing. I've been reading about it. Kids who lose a parent young, sometimes the grief turns into this, this need to control something, and food is the thing they can control. Hoarding. Secret eating. It's in all the literature."
"She looked hungry."
"Of course she looked hungry. She performs it. She's very good at it. Grant, she does it when you're here because she knows you'll react." Celeste's voice was very gentle. "I'm not saying she means it. I'm not saying she's a bad kid. I'm saying she needs real help, more than I can give her, and more than you can give her when you're on a ship four nights a week. I've been talking to someone about it. A professional. Her name is Renée Albright. She does family transitions. She's helped a lot of families in exactly our situation."