It doesn't matter. I had it. I've had it for 3 years. She pushed it gently across the table toward Odora. Not all the way, just part way into the space between them.
Mama used it for everything she made us, she said. Her voice was careful again, but differently careful than it usually was careful. Like something fragile was being transported, not like armor being maintained. Every dress, every hem I've been thinking, she stopped, started over. When you were sewing the Christmas dresses, you didn't have one.
You didn't say anything about it, but I saw your fingers afterward. She looked at the thimble. She'd have been. I think she would have. She stopped for the third time, and her expression did something complicated.
Odora waited. I think she'd rather someone use it, Marin said, than have me hide it. She looked up then. Her dark eyes were very steady. Please don't go, she said.
It was three words. They landed in the quiet kitchen like three different weights, each one settling separately. Odora sat with them. She looked at the thimble between them, the small brass thimble that had made hems and collars, and probably every dress Voss ever sewed for her daughters, worn smooth where the thumb rested against it, kept in a 13-year-old's pocket for 3 years, because the girl couldn't let it go to the dark of a locked room. Odora's throat was doing something she was not going to allow to become visible.
"Marin," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. I'm not asking you to stay for me, Marin said quickly. I know that's I'm not trying to make you feel. She pressed her lips together.
I'm just asking. I know it might not. I know you might go anyway. I know I can't decide that. A pause.
I just wanted you to know that I'm asking. From the dark of the kitchen doorway, something moved. Odora looked up. Garrick stood at the threshold. Not in his coat, in his work clothes, which meant he'd come down from upstairs without going going back outside, which meant he'd been somewhere between the stairs and the kitchen, and he had heard.