His face was not composed. It was not the careful blankness he produced in situations he was managing. It was something else entirely, the face of a man who has just watched someone do something he has been failing to do for 3 years and understood the precise nature of his failure. He was looking at his daughter. Marin turned and saw him.
She did not flinch. She looked at her father with the directness she mostly kept locked away and he looked back at her and something passed between them that Odora felt rather than saw the particular quality of two people who love each other and have been miscommunicating the love for a long time and have just in one unguarded moment managed to say a true thing. Garrick did not speak. He looked at Marin for a long time, and then he looked at the thimble on the table, and then he looked at Odora, and the expression on his face was one she was not going to try to name in the low lamplight in a kitchen in Wyoming at midnight. It was too many things.
It had been building for too long to be one thing. He stepped back from the doorway, not away, into the dark of the kitchen corner, where the lamp didn't quite reach, where he could hear without being fully visible. It was not hiding. He was giving his daughter the room she'd claimed without diminishing it by making himself the center of it. Marin turned back to Odora.
She had seen her father. She knew he was there. She turned back to Odora anyway because she had started a thing and she was Marin Voss and she was going to finish it. Papa told me this morning that I should go back to bed. She said her voice had recovered its evenness, but it was a different evenness.
Not the armored kind. The kind that comes after you've put something down. He said the ranch was going to be all right and we were going to be all right. He says things like that because he believes them. She looked at Odora directly.
He's right. We would be all right. We were all right before. She paused. But all right isn't the same thing as she glanced at the thimble.
All right isn't what we have now. Odora looked at the thimble between them on the table. Small brass smooth where else Voss had rested her thumb against it for years. 3 years in a 13-year-old's pocket. On the table now, partway between them.
She reached out and picked it up. It was lighter than she expected. It was always slightly surprising. The things that carry the most weight in a life are often the lightest things. She turned it in her fingers and felt the smooth interior, the worn rim at the top, the dimpled surface around the outside where it had been struck by countless needles and countless hems.