She got up from the desk and followed Madison.
The staircase was the best thing in the house.Quarter-sawn oak, a newel post some long-dead craftsman had turned by hand until it was perfect, and an intricate perfectly joined checkerboard of oak cover paneling covering the walls.
At the top of the stairs, a door stood open to a bedroom, and Sunny stopped in front of it automatically.
The far corner of the room was perfect.A single bed was made hospital-tight, the gray cardigan was folded over the back of a wooden chair with a lamp set beside it at the precise angle to light a book held by anyone sitting in the chair, and a bookcase shelf held rows of books arranged by height.
It was an island of absolute order.The rest of the room, all around that one corner, was cardboard boxes, some unopened, others with clothes overflowing them.A double mattress and box springs leaned against the wall with no headboard or frame.A set of cheap curtains still in their plastic lay on the floor beside a boxed curtain rod.
Sunny had seen that exact arrangement everywhere she’d lived after Winston.She’d created one small square of her world that was flawless because she couldn’t get her hands around the rest of it.
“It’s not finished.”Madison’s was sharp and defensive.“It’s not finished.”
Every instinct Sunny had: the designer’s, the mother’s, the manager’s, lined up to say,here’s what you do.She felt the words rise.Paint first, then the bed against that wall, you’ll want a desk under the window ...
She’d walked a hundred clients through exactly this, back when her opinion had been worth a great deal of money.
She closed her mouth on all of it.
“What do you want it to feel like?”she asked instead.
Madison blinked.It was, Sunny could see, not a question anyone had ever put to her before.
“Old,” Madison said warily, as if she expected to be argued out of it.“Like it’s been here a long time.With stuff somebody used and loved.“ A small grimace.“Not new stuff that comes in a box and looks like everybody else’s stuff.Dad keeps offering to buy me a matching bedroom set.But I don’t want matching.”
And just like that, Sunny felt the old clean joy she hadn’t felt in years.When a client understood a space and was willing to honor it, and she was going to get to do her job correctly.
“Patina,” she said, hearing the pleasure in her own voice and not bothering to hide it.“You want patina.Things with a history already in them so the room feels rooted instead of bought.That’s ...”she caught herself before sayingthat’s exactly rightcould land like a judgment and said,“...that’s a good way to want a room to feel.”
Madison had visibly been braced for her to try to take over, to redecorate the child along with the room, the way Sunny gathered someone had before.Madison looked startled now that she was getting instead an adult lighting up overheridea.
“I could help you find them,” Sunny said.“Old things.It used to be my job.But you’ll have to make all the decisions.This is your room, not mine, so you need to choose what goes in it.I just know where to look and can tell you what’s worth the money.”She shrugged and said lightly, “I’d be your shopping assistant.”
The girl was quiet a long moment.
“There’s a place just outside town with used furniture,” she said at last.“Dad said it looked like junk.”A flicker of a smile crossed her face.“It looked like junk tohim.But not to me.”
Sunny considered briefly.She could take the tray of bills home.Sort them and enter them in the spreadsheet this afternoon.It was nine-o’clock now.She had time to make a field trip and be back by eleven for Presley.
To Madison, she said, “Shall we go take a look at what they have?”
Madison’s face lit for a moment, then shuttered once more.Slow to trust, this child was.While it saddened Sunny to see someone so young be so cautious, she also thought it wasn’t a bad trait to take into the wider world of adulthood.
The place outside of town was a swaybacked barn with a hand-painted sign, run by an elderly woman who took one look at the two of them and went back to her crossword, which was exactly the right amount of attention they needed.
It was, to the untrained eye, junk.To Sunny it was a hunting ground.They moved through it slowly, and she taught Madison without making a lesson of it.She turned a chair over to show Madison the hand-cut joinery underneath, showed her the difference between a piece dinged up by eighty years of use and a piece beaten up last week with a chain to fake it.
“That one’s lying,” Sunny said, pointing at a distressed dresser with suspiciously even wear.“Real age doesn’t happen evenly.It collects where hands go and people brush past: the edges, the front of a drawer, the one corner everybody bumps.”
She ran her fingers over the velvet-smooth wear on an old writing desk.“This one’s telling the truth.Somebody sat here for many years, working on something.”
Madison had a good eye, untrained but quick to learn.She had solid instincts and a real affinity for old, used things.She found a small steamer trunk with someone’s faded initials stenciled on the end, and asked the owner whose they’d been.
The woman answered without looking up from the crossword that she’d bought it at an estate sale here in Cobbler Cove a few years back.The trunk, and probably the initials, had belonged to a schoolteacher who never married.Madison traced letters with her fingers like they mattered.
Sunny nodded in silent approval.Theydidmatter.They belonged to the person who’d valued this trunk enough to keep it her whole life.And that made it worth ten things nobody had loved yet.
Madison circled back to the writing desk.
