"Kevin, your mom, Tasha's boys, the teacher gift, the bus driver gift, and Ivy's big one, which I'm doing after she's asleep."
"The dollhouse."
"Shh."
"She's upstairs."
"She has ears like a bat. She heard me open the Oreos from the garage last week."
Matt smiled at that, and the smile went all the way to his eyes, and Renée, glancing up, felt the small familiar warmth of it. It had been a hard fall. She'd been on nights for most of November and the first part of December, covering for two nurses out on maternity leave, which was the kind of joke the universe liked to make on a labor and delivery floor. Three or four nights a week she had come home at seven-thirty in the morning, gray with exhaustion, passing Matt in the kitchen as he poured Ivy's cereal, kissing him on the jaw and falling into bed while the sun came up through the blinds. They had been two ships, as her mother would have said. But the schedule had rotated back. She was on days again. This was the first full weekend the three of them had spent together in what felt like a month, and she had promised herself she would enjoy it.
From upstairs came the sound of small feet, the particular thump-thump-pause of a six-year-old doing something she had been told not to do.
"Ivy Raymonde," Renée called. "You're supposed to be in your pajamas."
No answer. Then the creak of the third stair from the top, which always creaked, which was how they had known for years exactly when Ivy was sneaking down.
"I'm making an entrance," Ivy called back. "Don't look yet."