"I'm going to drive out there and I'm going to stand in your den and I'm going to look that man in the eye."
"Please don't. Ivy will know something's wrong. She already knows something's wrong. I just want to get her through Christmas."
Another silence. Renée could hear the twins in the background, arguing over a video game, and Andre's deep voice telling them to keep it down, their auntie was on the phone.
"You know what I keep thinking about," Tasha said finally. "That picture. At Carol's house. The girl with the sparkler."
Renée closed her eyes. "Tash."
"I'm just saying. I've been to that house four times in eleven years and every single time that picture was right there on the side table, next to the one of Matt in his football uniform. And not one picture of you. Not one picture of Ivy until she was two."
"Carol has pictures of Ivy now."
"Now. Sure." Tasha's voice softened. "I'm not saying it's about that. I'm not saying Matt did this because of that. I'm saying there's a whole town out there that thought he was supposed to marry that girl, and his mama is the mayor of it. And she gave her the number, Ren. She gave her the number."
Renée didn't say anything. She watched a man in a security uniform walk slowly past the car, his breath clouding in the cold, and she thought about the first Thanksgiving she had gone to Arden Grove, how Carol had hugged her at the door and said, "Well, aren't you lovely," and then turned and said to Matt's father, in a voice she perhaps thought was lower than it was, "She's very pretty, isn't she, Don. Very articulate." And how Matt, in the car on the way home, had said, "She didn't mean anything by it. That's just how she talks," and Renée had let it go, because she had been in love, and because she had already spent her whole life deciding which things to let go and which ones to pick up and carry.
"I know," she said. "I know she did."
"What are you going to do?"