Celeste came back from Portland on a Friday.
Not with fanfare. Not with the particular energy of someone returning with something significant, which was exactly the point, which was something she and Theo had discussed on the phone the night before she drove back, the importance of arriving the way she had arrived the first time, with the unremarkable confidence of a woman visiting family, nothing in her posture or her pace that would tell Conrad's watching eyes that the ground had shifted in the four days she had been gone.
She was very good at this.
I watched her come through the front door from the kitchen corridor and I read her face in the half second before she arranged it for the house and I saw what was in it and I had to turn back to the stove and breathe through what seeing it
