"Marin," I said, "I've got it." Her voice was not unkind. It was controlled, which was worse. Odora went to the table and sat down and poured her own coffee and said nothing because there was nothing to say that Marin was ready to hear yet, and saying it prematurely would only shut the door faster. By the end of the first week, Marin had also taken back Bess's morning braid.
Not confrontationally, she had simply appeared at the right moment, with the ribbon already in her hand, and Bess had looked between her sister and Odora, with the uncertain expression of a small child caught between two claims she didn't understand. Odora had stepped back and let it happen. Tilda's coat came out on Thursday with a fresh button that matched the others. Marin had found matching buttons somewhere, maybe from her own reserve, and replaced every mismatch one without comment. The coat now had five correct buttons in a row.
Marin began doing laundry on Saturday again. She did all of it without anger, without hostility, without a word directed at Odora. She was polite. She passed things at the table. She answered when spoken to.
She simply and methodically reinstated herself between Odora and every point of access she had been permitted to have with her sisters. She was preparing the household to survive. Odora recognized it because she had done something similar herself once when she was 14 and her aunt Rosamund had mentioned in passing that she'd been asked to consider a position in Saint Louis for a year. Rosamund had not taken it, had never seriously been considering it, but Odora hadn't known that. For 3 weeks she had quietly taken back every small responsibility she'd allowed Rosamund to carry for her.
And she had done it not out of anger, but out of the terrible logic of a girl who had already lost her parents and understood that you prepared for loss by practicing it before it arrived. Rosamund had finally noticed and sat down with her at the kitchen table and said, "I'm not going anywhere. But even if I were, you don't have to live in advance of the loss." She'd said it with the dry directness she used for everything. And Odora had not believed her fully until it became clear that she wasn't going.
And even then, it had taken her a while to stop holding herself against the possibility. Marin had no one to tell her, "Not yet." And Odora could not tell her because she had not decided yet what she was going to do about Fort Collins, and she was not going to make a promise. She wasn't certain she could keep to a girl who already had 3 years of evidence that people left. So, she let Marin do the laundry.
She stepped back from Bess's morning braid. She watched the girl rebuild her fortifications and felt every stone of it settle in her own chest, and she held her peace. Garrick noticed the change in Marin before he understood it. He noticed first because the oatmeal tasted different. Not wrong, just different, lighter, the way it had tasted before Odora started doing the mornings, which meant Marin had been at the stove, which meant Marin was not sitting at the table with her sisters.
He noticed second because Odora's movements in the kitchen had changed. She was moving around the edges again. Not the tentative, calibrated movements of her first days, but something in between less centered than she'd become, slightly stepped back, like a woman giving room to something. He didn't ask her about it directly. He didn't have the standing for that kind of directness yet, or didn't think he did.