Renée had gone, alone, to Dr. Okafor every other Wednesday. She had talked about her father and the South Side route he walked for thirty-one years. She had talked about nursing school and the Walgreens and every room she had ever walked into and been measured in before she opened her mouth. She had talked about sureness, and armor, and how tired she was of carrying both. She had cried a great deal, mostly in the car afterward. She had taken a pottery class and made eleven lopsided bowls. She had not filed anything. She had not needed to be sure.
Lauren Voss had sold the house on Elm in April and gone back to St. Paul. Carol had mentioned it once, carefully, and then not again. There had been no texts. There had been, in late January, a sympathy-sized envelope addressed to Renée alone, with a Minnesota postmark. Inside was a single card with no picture on it and three words: You were right. Renée had known what it meant. The breathing. The pauses. The hearing being the last thing to go. She had kept the card for a week and then put it in the recycling, not out of anger, but because it was finished.
Ivy was seven. She had lost both front teeth. She had been promoted in the pageant from third shepherd to Mary, a role she approached with such gravity that she practiced cradling Mrs. Fitzgerald in the den every evening for two weeks. She knew the capitals of thirty-one states. She asked, sometimes, at bedtime, whether Mommy and Daddy were going to get back together, and Renée told her the truth, which was that she didn't know yet, and that whatever happened, it would not be because of anything Ivy had done, and Ivy would sigh, and say "I know, I know," with the weariness of someone who had been told something so many times it had finally become furniture.
* * *
On the evening of December eighteenth, a Sunday, a year almost to the hour after Ivy came down the stairs in silver, Matt came to the house on Larkspur Court to help Ivy decorate the tree.
It had been Ivy's idea. She had asked both of them, separately, and then together, in the parking lot after school, with her mittened hands clasped under her chin, and Renée had looked at Matt over Ivy's head and seen him trying very hard not to hope, and she had said, "Sure, baby. Daddy can come."
He rang the bell. He had never once rung the bell in nine years of living there, and now he rang it, and stood on the porch with snow on his shoulders and a box of cinnamon rolls from the bakery under his arm, and when Renée opened the door he said, "Hi," like a teenager picking up a date, and she had to look away to keep from laughing, or doing something else.
The tree was a Fraser fir again, from the lot behind the Lutheran church. Renée and Ivy had dragged it in themselves the day before, swearing at the netting, Ivy learning two words she was not supposed to repeat. It stood in the corner in its red metal stand, bare, waiting. The stockings hung on the mantel, all three of them, MATTHEW and RENÉE and IVY in Carol's white script. Renée had thought for a long time about whether to hang his. In the end she had hung it, and had not let herself decide what that meant either.
Ivy came thundering down the stairs. The third step from the top creaked.
"Daddy, look," she said, and stopped at the bottom of the steps into the den, and spread her arms.
She was wearing a cardigan. A child's cardigan, her own size, soft gray with a thread of silver running through it, not so much that it glittered, just enough that it caught the light when she moved. It came to her hips. The sleeves ended at her wrists. Renée had found it in October at a little shop in downtown Naperville and had stood holding it for ten minutes, unable to decide whether buying it would be healing or cruelty, and had finally bought it because Ivy had asked for her own, and because something that had been stolen from her daughter, some small sparkle of delight, deserved to be given back properly.