end of your break. Let me feed you. Let you sleep past five in the morning for once in your life. We'll drive over to Burlington and look at the campus, and you can see what it's like in the winter, which, I warn you, is cold enough to freeze the words in your mouth."
Claire stared at her. "Mom won't let me."
"You're seventeen, and your father is the other half of the permission. I've a feeling he'll say yes." Her grandmother reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind Claire's ear, the way she used to when Claire was small. "And Claire. The quilt is yours. The necklace is yours. The money is yours, and it will be returned to you, every cent, if I have to sit in that kitchen until Easter. Do you understand me? None of this is a question."
Claire nodded. She couldn't speak.
"Good," said Grandma Ruth. "Now help me up. This swing has opinions about my hip."
The rest of Christmas Day was the strangest Claire could remember.
Nobody yelled, exactly. Her mother went upstairs to the master bedroom and shut the door, and her father followed after a while, and for most of the afternoon the low murmur of their voices came through the ceiling, rising sometimes and then falling again. The ham sat in the refrigerator. The torn paper stayed on the living room floor. Grandma Ruth made grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch, and she and Claire ate them at the kitchen counter and played gin rummy, and her grandmother won six hands in a row without seeming to try.
Madison didn't come down.
Around four, when the light outside had gone blue and the snow had finally stopped, Claire went upstairs to change out of her damp jeans. When she opened the door to her room, her sister was sitting on her bed.
Madison was still in her pajamas. Her face was blotchy from crying. In her lap was the green quilt, folded carefully into a square, and on top of the quilt was the long narrow box with the necklace inside it.
"Hi," Madison said.
Claire stood in the doorway. "Hi."
"I wanted to give you these." Madison held out the quilt with both arms, like an offering. "I didn't know. I swear, Claire, I didn't know they were yours. I thought Grandma just made it for me. I wouldn't have said it was old-lady if I'd known. It's not old-lady. It's really pretty."
Claire came in and took the quilt. It was heavier than she expected, and soft, and it smelled very faintly of lavender and woodsmoke. She sat down on the bed beside her sister and unfolded one corner until she found the white embroidered letters of her name, and she traced them with her finger.
"I know you didn't know," she said.
"But I should have, right?" Madison wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her pajamas. "That's what I keep thinking. Like, I sat there and opened, what, forty presents? And you got socks. And I didn't even notice. I didn't even look over at you. I was filming it. I was going to post it." She gave a short, miserable laugh. "Best Christmas ever."