She was still at the kitchen table. She'd given up on going to bed at 10:00 and given up on pretending she wasn't sitting here at 11:00. And by she had simply accepted that this was where she was and she would be here until she was somewhere else. The lamp was low. The kitchen had gone from warm to adequately warm as the stove burned down.
The footstep on the upper landing was Marin's. Odora had lived in this house long enough to know every footstep on every floorboard. She listened to Marin come down the stairs, heard her pause at the kitchen entrance. She could see the girl's shadow in the lamp throw across the floor and then move on. Past the kitchen down the small hall toward the pantry room toward Odora's door.
Odora set her hands on the table and I want you to have this. She heard the knock. Small and deliberate. Marin's knock on Odora's door when she'd come to find her sewing always. Three short knocks in the same rhythm.
In the kitchen, Odora said a pause. Then the footstep came back. Marin appeared in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown and her wool wrap, her dark hair loose, her feet in the thick socks she wore on cold nights. She was holding something in her right hand that Odora couldn't see clearly in the low light. She stopped at the threshold and looked at Odora for a moment.
She did not look like she had been crying, but she looked like someone who had been very much awake for a long time and had arrived at something through the wakefulness. She came into the kitchen and sat in the chair across the table. She set the thing she was holding on the table between them. It was a thimble, small brass, old in the way that things go old when they've been used constantly for a long time, and then kept very still. It had a surface that was neither bright nor tarnished, something in between, the color of something that had been worn smooth by contact rather than time.
Odora looked at it. She looked at Marin. I've had it since she died, Marin said. I took it from the sewing room the morning after. Papa locked the room and I had it in my pocket by the time he did.
The kitchen was very quiet. Even the wind seemed to have eased slightly. Or maybe Odora's attention had simply narrowed to this table, this lamp, this girl. I wasn't trying to I didn't hide it from him on purpose. Marin looked at the thimble.
At the beginning, I just wanted to have something. And then time went by and it seemed like telling him I'd taken it would she stopped. He locked that room because he couldn't stand to see it. Telling him I'd taken her thimble out of it seemed like it would make him feel like even the locking hadn't. She shook her head.