"Did he tell you what he said to me? The first night? About your house?"
"No."
Lauren hesitated. "I don't want to—I'm not trying to make it worse. I'm really not. I just think you should know, because I think it's the real thing. More than the kiss." She took a breath. "He said sometimes he feels like a guest in his own life. Like everything in it is good, and he's grateful for it, and he doesn't know how he got there. He said he never really decided anything. He said he went to Illinois because his dad went to Illinois, and he went into HVAC because his uncle had a firm, and he was going to marry me because everybody expected it, and then he didn't, and he thought that was the one brave thing he ever did. And then he said—" She stopped.
"Say it."
"He said, 'And then I met Renée, and she was so sure about everything. She's so sure. She's always so sure. And I just went along, and it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, but sometimes I wonder if I've ever chosen anything in my life at all.'"
Renée sat very still.
She thought about the dental office in Lincoln Park. She thought about how she had been the one to ask him to dinner, the following week, when he called to ask if she had ever found a better magazine. How she had been the one to say, after a year, I think we should move in together. How she had found this house, and said, This one, and he had said, If you love it, I love it. How she had said, at thirty-two, I want a baby, and he had said, Okay, and she had taken that as joy. How she had brought up a second child two years ago, and he had said, I don't know, Ren, I just don't know, and she had pressed, and he had gone quiet, and she had dropped it, and then he had forgotten it the way he forgot everything.
She had been so sure. She was always so sure. It was what made her good at her job. It was what had carried her through nursing school on loans and night shifts at a Walgreens, through her father's long dying, through every room where someone looked at her and decided before she opened her mouth exactly who and what she was. Sureness was armor. She had worn it for so long she had forgotten it was something she had put on.
"That doesn't excuse it," she heard herself say.
"No," Lauren agreed. "It doesn't. Nothing excuses it. I just thought you should know that's what was underneath."
Renée looked down at the reindeer bag. She reached into it and took out the silver cardigan and laid it on the oak table, folded. Then the bracelet, coiled on top. Then the single silver heel, which she stood upright beside them, the way she had stood it on the den floor five nights earlier.