"Can I have one? A sparkly one? Not hers. My own."
Renée felt something crack open in her chest, painful and almost funny. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe someday."
* * *
On Christmas morning Ivy woke at five-fifteen and stood in the doorway of the guest room in her penguin pajamas, staring at her mother on the guest bed with an expression of deep confusion.
"Why are you sleeping in here?"
"Daddy snores," Renée said, which was true, though it had never driven her from the room before. "Is it morning?"
"It's Christmas," Ivy said, scandalized that she had to be told.
They went down together, the three of them, Matt shuffling out of the master bedroom with his hair sticking up. The tree was lit. Renée had come down at midnight to fill the stockings with chocolate coins and glitter pens and the little snow globe with the fox inside it. Matt had come down at one, she guessed, because the cookies on the plate by the fireplace were gone and a note in his blocky engineer's handwriting said, THANK YOU IVY, DELICIOUS, LOVE S. Ivy read it aloud three times.
The dollhouse was a success. Ivy screamed when she tore away the silver snowflake paper and then lay down on the rug with her cheek pressed against its tiny front porch. A gray stuffed rabbit with absurdly long ears was named Mrs. Fitzgerald within thirty seconds for reasons no one could determine.
And then Ivy went to the tree and dug underneath it, behind the skirt, and came out with two small, terribly wrapped packages, smothered in tape, labeled in purple marker. One said MOMMY. One said DADDY.
"I made them at school," she said. "Open them at the same time."