At midnight she blew out the lamp and lay down in her clothes, and did not sleep.
***
Three miles east, in a two-room cabin with a sod roof, Tom Garrity sat at his table with the rusty chain coiled by the door. Sometime after the moon came up the boards creaked, and Hannah was standing in the doorway in her nightgown.
"Miss Lindqvist said it was very bad, what you did," she said.
"She's right."
"She said telling was right but it doesn't put things back."
Garrity rubbed his face with both hands. "She's right about that too."
Hannah came and looked at the chain. "Is that why we don't have money? Because Mr. Whitcombe stopped giving you work?"
"Partly. Partly I drank too much for a while after your ma died." He made himself look at her. "After tomorrow nobody will trust me at all, Hannah. I'll lose my commission. They might try me for swearing false. People are going to say things to you at school. If there's school."
"I know." She touched the chain with one bare toe, the way you'd touch a snake you weren't sure was dead. "Why did you keep the piece?"
He had almost thrown it in the Sable a dozen times, and in the stove more than that.
"So I couldn't pretend I hadn't done it," he said slowly. "A man can talk himself into anything if there's no evidence. I kept it so there'd always be one thing in the world that knew."