Sure of.
That was the difference.
Caleb found the key to the sewing room.
Not on purpose.
Or at least he claimed not on purpose.
Gideon had enough experience with Caleb by now to know the distinction between the boy's accidental discoveries and his orchestrated ones.
This had the texture of the former.
He'd been looking for a button in the small wooden box Clara kept on the hallway shelf.
The key had been in the bottom of the box under a coil of spare thread.
He'd brought it to Gideon one afternoon in mid-January and held it out without a word.
Gideon looked at it.
"It's a key," Caleb said.
"I can see that."
"It says M on the tag."
He looked at Gideon evenly behind his glasses.
"I thought it might be for the room at the end of the hall."
Gideon took it from him.
"Thank you," he said.
Caleb went back to whatever he'd been doing.
Gideon stood in the kitchen for a while with the key in his hand.
Then he went upstairs.
He stood outside the door for longer than he intended.
The hallway was quiet.
Afternoon light coming through the window at the far end.
The sounds of the house below him.
Clara somewhere.
One of the boys.
The particular creak of the second stair that he'd fixed but that still had opinions.
He put the key in the lock.
It turned.
The room smelled like disuse.
And very faintly underneath it, like the lavender sachets Maggie had kept in her fabric drawers.
The light came in flat and pale through the window he hadn't opened in 18 months.
Dusty at the edges.
Catching the particles in the air that he'd disturbed just by opening the door.
Her sewing table was still there.
Her chair.
A basket of fabric scraps she'd been sorting when she got sick.
Left mid-task.
The way illness left things.
Mid-task.
Mid-sentence.
Midlife.
A finished quilt folded on the window seat that she'd made the winter before she died.
Blue and white.
The kind of careful handwork that he'd always watched with admiration because he had no patience for anything that required that kind of stillness.
He stood in the doorway and looked at all of it.