The oatmeal made a soft sound under its lid. Odora looked at this girl, this 13-year-old girl with her competent hands and her early morning braiding ribbons and her three pale hemlines that had been the beginning of everything and felt something in her own chest that was partly grief and partly something less comfortable than grief. I know, she said. It came out more simply than she'd intended, less managed. Marin looked at her.
Is that all you're going to say? What do you want me to say? I want you to Marin stopped. The fists in her lap opened. She looked at the table.
When she spoke again, her voice had gone small in a way that was clearly costing her. I want you to say you're not going. The silence stretched. Outside, the wind pressed at the house. I can't tell you that, Odora said.
Not yet. Not honestly. Marin absorbed this with the particular stillness of a person receiving a blow they were prepared for. She nodded once very slightly. Then she stood up and checked the oatmeal and put the lid back with a small precise motion.
"All right," she said. Marin, I said, "All right, Miss Finch." She kept her back to the room. Her voice had gone careful again, the protective careful, the armor going back on. "I need to get Bess's ribbons ready."
She picked the ribbons off the table and went to the stairs. Odora sat in the kitchen and listened to her footsteps go up. And then she sat a while longer in the dim kitchen with her hands flat on the table. And she thought about the letter in the bottom of her cedar trunk and the bare boardss and the 127 tacks arranged by size on the wash stand. And she thought about this girl who was tired of learning to do without.
She did not know in that moment what she was going to do. But she knew the not knowing was costing more than she'd let herself admit. Worst night of the winter came on a Thursday in the second week of February without much warning, the way the worst things tend to come. The temperature dropped fast in the afternoon, while Garrick and Harland were still in the east pasture. And by the time they got the cattle moved, and the barn sealed, it was 20 below and falling, and the wind had come around to the north with a particular viciousness that found every gap in every structure and inserted itself.
Garrick came in long after supper was done, which Odora had kept warm on the back of the stove. His hands took 10 minutes to work properly again after he came inside, and he ate standing at the stove rather than sitting because the warmth from the firebox was more immediate there. She watched him from across the kitchen without saying anything about it. "How many?" She asked finally.