Then she looked at Matt.
He had stopped working at the knot. The lights lay still in his lap. His face had done something she had never seen it do before, a kind of quick, total stillness, as if every muscle had been told at once to wait. And then, a beat too late, he smiled.
He said, "You definitely sparkle enough."
His voice was light. It was almost right. But Renée had been married to this man for eleven years and had known him for thirteen, and she had heard him tell her mother he loved her sweet potato pie, which he did not, and she had heard him tell his boss he'd be happy to fly to Omaha, which he was not, and she knew the precise sound of Matthew Kessler saying the correct thing over the top of something else.
She looked back at Ivy. At the cardigan. It was nothing she owned. It was nothing she would have owned; she didn't wear silver, didn't wear anything that sparkled except on New Year's Eve, and even then only earrings. It was too long and too fine and it smelled, she realized, as Ivy twirled closer and the air moved, faintly of a perfume that was not hers. Something with vanilla in it. Something with amber.
She kept her voice soft. She was good at that. She had kept her voice soft through postpartum hemorrhages and shoulder dystocias and the worst night of her professional life, when a father had put his fist through a wall in Room 6. Softness was a tool. You picked it up when you needed to keep everyone in the room calm, including yourself.
"Sweetheart… whose cardigan is that?"
Ivy looked down at herself, at the silver cascading over her penguin pajamas, as if noticing for the first time that it might belong to someone. She tugged at a sleeve.
"Daddy’s friend’s." She said it simply, helpfully. "She left it here when you worked all night."
The tree lights hummed.
Renée did not look at Matt right away. She looked at the scissors in her hand, which she had picked up again without knowing it. She set them down very carefully on the silver paper, parallel to the edge of the roll, the way you would set down an instrument on a sterile tray.