He had told her about Lauren early. He had been honest about it, she'd thought. "We grew up together," he'd said. "Everybody assumed. And then one day I realized I'd never actually decided anything. I'd just gone along." Renée had liked that about him, then. That he could say a thing like that about himself.
"Mommy, you're squeezing."
She had been holding Ivy's foot through the quilt, too tightly. She let go.
"Sorry, baby."
"Miss Lauren has a daddy who's sick," Ivy said. "She told me. He's in a hospital that's not a regular hospital. It's a place where they make you comfortable. That's what she said."
"Hospice," Renée said.
"Hospice," Ivy repeated, trying the word. "That's why she was crying the second time. I heard it through the floor. I came to the top of the stairs and Daddy was hugging her on the couch. I went back to bed because I was supposed to be asleep."
Renée said nothing. Downstairs, through the floor, she could hear Matt moving around the den. A clink. The scrape of a bin being pushed across the floor.
"And the third time, the princess night, I came down for water. And she was there. And she had her shoes off. And she was sitting really close to Daddy." Ivy frowned, puzzling it through. "And then Daddy stood up really fast and said, 'Hey, Bug, what are you doing up?' And Miss Lauren got up and she let me try her bracelet and her shoes and said I was a movie star, and then she said she had to go, and she went really fast. She put her coat on and she couldn't find her other shoe, and she went out with just one shoe in her hand. In the snow. In her socks." Ivy giggled despite herself. "Like Cinderella but backward."
"And then what happened?"
"Daddy put me back to bed. He said Miss Lauren was an old friend who was having a hard time, and that you were working really hard to help babies get born, and we didn't need to bother you about it because you were so tired. He said it was our grown-up secret, but not a bad secret, just a not-bothering-Mommy secret." Ivy turned her head on the pillow and looked at Renée with those creek-water eyes. "But you just said it's not a secret."