"And then we'll see."
He nodded. He looked at her for a long moment across the den, in the soft light, and she could see him wanting to cross the room, to kneel in front of her, to say something perfect. She could see him not doing it. She was grateful.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"You can ask."
"What did she thank you for? Lauren. My mom said—"
Renée looked down at her hands. "I told her what dying looks like," she said. "So she wouldn't be scared when it came."
Matt stared at her. Then he put his face in his hands, and his broad shoulders shook, and Renée sat on the couch and let him cry, and did not go to him, and did not leave.
* * *
A year later the snow came early, the first week of December, and stayed.
Matt rented a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an old brick building on Washington Street in Naperville, above a bakery that started its ovens at four in the morning, so that he woke every day to the smell of bread. He had told Renée, in one of their sessions with Dr. Adaeze Okafor, a soft-spoken woman with an office full of ferns, that it was the first place he had ever lived that he had chosen entirely by himself. He had said it with a kind of embarrassed wonder, and Dr. Okafor had nodded and written something down, and Renée had looked at the ferns and felt something she could not name, something between grief and pride.
He picked Ivy up from school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and had her every other weekend. He had bought her a loft bed for the apartment, and he had put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above it, in the shape of the summer constellations this time, because he said she should have a different sky at each house. In March he had left his uncle's firm and taken a job with a smaller company in Lisle that retrofitted old schools with geothermal systems, for less money. In May he had told his mother, finally, in her own den, what he had done, and had asked her to stop bringing up Lauren Voss, and to take down the photograph on the side table, and Carol had cried and not spoken to him for three weeks, and then had mailed Renée a card with a picture of a cardinal on it and four lines inside, in her careful church-secretary hand, that said she was sorry, that she hadn't thought, that she should have thought. Renée had read it at the kitchen island and then put it in the drawer by the stove, beside her mother's macaroni and cheese recipe, and had not decided yet what it meant.