A fraction of a fraction of an inch. But a lock is a thing of fractions, and that warp meant every wheel inside was dragging against its neighbors, all of them fighting him at once. He could have forced it. A man with a torch and no patience and no care for what was inside could have cut that safe open in an afternoon, the way the county had probably been tempted to a dozen times over 16 years.
But Arthur had not paid $90 to destroy what his father had died beside. He wanted it open and whole. And so the only tool he had for the job was the one he had been born with and could not buy or borrow, the patience to listen to a mechanism that did not want to talk. He settled in.
The hours went strange the way they do for a person alone with a single task in the middle of the night. Outside, Mercer Street emptied. The hardware store below him went dark. The last truck rattled past sometime before midnight, and after that, there was nothing but the small hiss of the oil lamp and the boy's own breathing and the steady careful click of the dial under his fingers.
He worked the first wheel feeling for the place where its drag changed, where the notch wanted to sit. And it took him longer than it had ever taken him on any of Walt's practice locks because the warp lied to him through false catches made every wheel feel like the right one until he tested it and the lever stayed up. His hands began to give out before his patience did. The dial was small and the fire had pitted its edge, and turning it a thousand times ten thousand times with the firm steady pressure the work demanded wore the skin of his fingers raw.
A blister rose at the base of his thumb and broke, and the brass went slick under it and he wiped his hand on his trousers and kept on. There was no one to see him do it, and no one to see what it cost him. And somewhere in those small hours, that fact stopped being lonely and became almost holy. It was just him and the steel and the thing his father had left inside it.
He thought about Samuel Callaway more in those hours than he ever had in his life. He had no memories of the man, only the soft photograph and the cruel story. And into that empty space, he had always been careful not to pour too much hope, because hope was a thing that could be taken from you. And he had learned young to keep it small.