She looked at Marin. "I'm going to need some time," she said. Marin held very still. Not to decide whether to go, Odora said to decide how to stay. There's a difference, and I need you to understand that the difference matters.
She held Marin's gaze. If I stay here and nothing changes about the arrangement, I will eventually leave. Not because I want to, but because wanting to be somewhere and being allowed to be somewhere permanently are not the same thing. Do you understand what I'm saying? Marin was quiet for a moment.
Then you mean you can't just be the housekeeper forever. Yes, you'd need to be mayor and stopped. She was a 13-year-old girl working through a very large piece of arithmetic, and she was doing it with a thorowness that was entirely characteristic, something different. Yes, Marin sat with this. Her expression moved through several things.
Calculation, recognition, and then something that was either acceptance or the precursor to acceptance. Odora couldn't quite tell in the low light. Does Papa know that? Marin said. I don't know what your father knows," Odora said.
Marin looked over her shoulder at the kitchen corner where the dark was, then back at Odora. Her mouth did something almost a smile, but not quite, more like the shadow a smile leaves. "He's still there," she said quietly, "for Odora's ears only." "I know," Odora said. Marin stood up.
She straightened her wrap around her shoulders. She looked at the thimble still in Odora's hand, and something in her face went soft at the edges for just a moment. The young girl face under the competent manager, the face she had been before 3 years of early morning breakfasts and counting to four hemlines. "Good night, Miss Finch," she said. "Good night, Maron."
She went to the doorway and paused there, looking into the dark where her father stood, and she said, "Good night, Papa." In a voice that had nothing armored in it at all, and then she went up the stairs. The kitchen was very quiet. Garrett came out of the corner slowly into the edge of the lamp's reach. He looked like a man who had been taken apart at some of the joints and was not yet certain they had been put back in exactly the same configuration.
He looked at the thimble in Odora's hand. He stood there for a moment and then pulled out the chair across from her Marin's chair, still warm from the girl, and sat down. Neither of them spoke. The wind had genuinely eased outside, or Odora had stopped hearing it. The stove made its low ticking.