Back in the day, her grandparents had a scarcity mindset, always pinching pennies, even at the most indulgent time of the year. They gave one present each to Ruth and Eli, instilling in them the value of family, not frivolity. Not that she and her brother had appreciated the larger lesson back then.

Ruth had been three years old when their biological mother left them. Very few memories of the woman lodged in her brain, but on the last Christmas they spent together, Joanna wore a short red Santa dress with bells dangling from her butt. The bells jingled when she walked, and that sound made Ruth laugh. She would have followed her mother anywhere.

In every fleeting, possibly phantom memory of their mother, Ruth had to begrudgingly acknowledge the woman’s beauty, her high cheekbones and those dimples Ruth had liked to press to see if they’d pop back out. That Christmas, Joanna surprised her with a mesh bag filled with marbles in every color imaginable. Ruth remembered being enamored with the marbles, rolling them on the kitchen floor, delighting in the noise they made, until Mama scooped them back into the bag and yelled at Joanna. Too young to understand the argument and desperate to play with those marbles, Ruth cried uncontrollably. It wasn’t until years later that Mama would relive that day, saying Joanna should’ve known better than to give a three-year-old a toy she could choke on. Careless, Mama said. Always careless.

Eli would’ve been nine that Christmas, and she couldn’t recall what their mother had given him, if anything. Whenever she tried to get her brother to tell her what he remembered about Joanna, he changed the subject. She suspected their mother’s disappearance had been harder on him because he’d known her longer, loved her longer, had more memories to suppress.

Christmas became a more sensible affair when she went to live with her grandparents. There was that time in Walmart when Ruth threw a tantrum after not getting the Cabbage Patch Kid doll she’d begged for, the one that came with a birth certificate you could frame. Their chubby cheeks and pinched faces fascinated her. Papa had been ready to cave, usually pliable after her desperate pleas, but melodrama around Mama rarely yielded more than a swat to the backside. She said, A girl your age doesn’t need to be playing house. No babies for you no time soon.

That night, Ruth had seen Mama kneeling in the closet, murmuring something to Jesus to ward off any nascent baby-making spirits. Oh, the irony of embodying her grandmother’s unanswered prayers, becoming everything the old woman had feared most.

Xavier wasn’t home from work yet, which gave Ruth uninterrupted time to wrap his Christmas present—a pair of Magnanni leather shoes, handcrafted in Spain. He had fawned over them obsessively on one of their trips to Nordstrom, admiring how the toasted-almond leather shone in the glint of the store lighting. He had vowed to own them one day. In a spontaneous moment, or a desperate one depending on how you looked at it, she had stopped at the Michigan Avenue store on her way home from work to buy them. He would whoop in delight at the sight of these shoes, and she needed to see him smile and watch his face erupt in joy again.

The last few weeks, she and Xavier had moved through their home like roommates, careful not to invade each other’s space, leaving notes that revealed just enough information about their whereabouts to stave off any missing-person reports to the police. The silences between them stretched like a rubber band about to snap. When they did speak, it was only to communicate the mundane: Have you changed the furnace filter yet? I bought a Christmas gift for Harvey and put both our names on it. Their marriage reminded her of the trunk of a tree in late winter or early spring, and already she could see the cracks, the gradual splitting of the bark. In time, new wood grew around a tree’s wound, sealing it off from further decay. She held on to the hope that Christmas Day would be their new wood.

With the wrapped Magnanni shoes tucked under the Christmas tree, Ruth felt ambitious that night, her impulse buy inspiring her to change into a dusty-rose silk negligee and drape a string of pearls across her body. She felt a bit silly. Besides, Xavier had never required a lot of packaging pretense; he had told her many times how sexy she looked in a baggy, ratty old T-shirt. But when he’d said that, he had no idea she’d been lying to him since the day they met. And besides, he’d been begging her to make love. She would do more than oblige him. She would do what she’d always done—overperform and exceed expectations.

Staging herself seductively on the bed, she tried multiple poses: Lying on her side with one hand on her thigh. Kneeling on all fours. Finally, she settled on a playful pose resting on her stomach, a position that made her tiny breasts puff up like dough popping out of a biscuit can. Then, she waited.

The first thing Xavier did when he walked into their bedroom was toss his keys on the nightstand. Still in his starched white shirt and dark gray slacks, he sat on the ottoman across from the bed, opening his laptop. Obviously, he saw her on the bed, but gave no indication that he noticed her body wrapped in silk and pearls.

Holding her breath, she sucked in her stomach to camouflage the slight pooch that became magnified by the thin fabric of her negligee. She wondered what on the computer screen had him so preoccupied. He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, still barely looking up at her. When he finally spoke, he sounded as officious and routine as a doctor in a patient exam room.

“Okay, I know you want to check in on your son. What information do you have? I assume you’ve got the adoption papers somewhere. Who are his adoptive parents? We need a plan. He could be in New York or China for all we know.”