She did not cry. That surprised her. She waited for it, the way you waited for a contraction you knew was coming, and it did not come. What came instead was a kind of terrible clarity. She found that she was remembering things. Matt in November, humming in the kitchen in a way he hadn't hummed in years. Matt buying new cologne, which he said was because the old one was discontinued. Matt saying, one morning when she came home gray and exhausted, "You know, you could ask to come off nights early. You don't have to be the hero every time." Matt asking her, in early December, almost casually, whether she ever thought about who she would have been if they hadn't met. She had laughed and said, "Tired, probably. Just tired in a different apartment." And he had laughed too. But he had asked.
She finished the dollhouse and slid it behind the couch where Ivy wouldn't see it. Then she took the reindeer bag with the cardigan and the shoe and the bracelet folded inside it, and she carried it up the stairs, past her bedroom door, behind which her husband was either asleep or pretending to be, and into the guest room, and she set it on the dresser and lay down on top of the covers in her jeans and her burgundy top and her gold hoops and stared at the ceiling, which had no stars on it at all.
* * *
In the morning they made pancakes.
It was a performance, and all three of them knew it, though only two of them knew what the play was about. Matt stood at the stove in his gray thermal, flipping pancakes shaped like snowmen, three circles of batter dripped carefully into the pan, and Renée sat at the kitchen island cutting strawberries, and Ivy knelt on a stool between them in her penguin pajamas, sprinkling powdered sugar onto everything with the manic joy of someone who had been given a shaker and no limits. The radio played Nat King Cole. The snow had stopped in the night, and the backyard was a clean white sheet under a hard blue sky.
"More snow on the snowman," Ivy commanded.
"He's going to get diabetes," Matt said.
"Snowmen can't get diabetes."
"That's what they want you to think."
Ivy giggled, and Renée watched Matt glance over at her, quick, hopeful, the way a dog looks at you after it has chewed a shoe, and she looked down at the strawberries and kept cutting.
Ivy was watching them both. Renée could feel it. Her daughter was eating her snowman pancake in small bites, and in between bites her eyes went from one parent to the other, back and forth, back and forth, like a spectator at a tennis match she did not understand the rules of. When Matt reached past Renée for the syrup, Ivy stopped chewing. When Renée said "thank you" to Matt for refilling her coffee, a little too politely, Ivy looked at her plate.