"Mommy," Ivy said. "Are you sad?"
"I'm tired, baby. It's late. And look at you, you're way past bedtime." She made herself smile. It was not hard, exactly; it was only that the smile seemed to come from a long way off, like a radio station almost out of range. "Let's get you upstairs. Let's take all this off so it doesn't get wrinkled."
"Can I keep the bracelet on? Just to sleep?"
"Not tonight."
She unwound the bracelet from Ivy's wrist, around and around and around, eight times, nine, the rhinestones clicking. It was cheap, she saw. Costume jewelry, the clasp a little bent. For some reason that made it worse. She slipped the cardigan off Ivy's shoulders and it fell into her hands, weightless, warm from her daughter's body, and the smell of vanilla and amber rose out of it and she had to hold her breath for a second.
She folded it over her arm. She picked up the heel.
"Ren," Matt said behind her.
"I'm going to put her to bed," Renée said, still not turning. "Then I'm going to come back down."
She took Ivy's hand, and they climbed the stairs together, and the third step from the top creaked under both of them.
* * *
Ivy's room was at the end of the hall, painted the pale green she had chosen at four because it was "the color of a frog's tummy." There were glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that Matt had arranged, one long Saturday, into the actual constellations of the northern winter sky, consulting an app on his phone, standing on a stepladder while Ivy shouted directions. Orion was over the bed. Renée had always loved that he had done that. That he had not just slapped the stars up any old way.