"I love my wife," she said. "That's nice. That's a nice line."
"It's true."
"Anytime. I mean it." She looked at him. "Was that true too?"
He didn't answer.
She stood up. She picked up the cardigan from the arm of the couch, and the shoe and the bracelet from the coffee table, and she gathered them against her chest, a soft silver armful that still smelled of another woman's skin. She didn't know why she was taking them. She only knew she couldn't leave them in this room, under the tree, under the stockings with their careful white names.
"Where are you going?" Matt said.
"I'm going to finish wrapping Ivy's dollhouse," Renée said. "And then I'm going to sleep in the guest room. And tomorrow we're going to get up and make pancakes and take our daughter to her pageant rehearsal and act like normal human beings, because she's six years old and it's a week until Christmas, and she already thinks this is her fault."
"Her fault? Why would she think—"
"Because she opened the bag, Matt. Because she told. Because she's six, and that's how six works." She turned at the bottom of the stairs. "And because the last grown-up who explained anything to her about this told her it was a secret."
* * *
She did wrap the dollhouse, though not until after two in the morning, and not well. Her hands, which could suture a second-degree tear without trembling, kept fumbling the tape. She sat alone on the floor of the den with the lights off except for the tree, and she worked the silver paper with the snowflakes around the big awkward box, and every so often she had to stop and sit very still with her palms flat on the rug, breathing.