She got started on the laundry. If she missed a day of laundry, it spiraled out of control. Did any of these details matter to anybody but Claire? The details that ruled her life, the five thousand tasks that cropped up in her day like obstacles in a video game—if Claire died or got sick, or took on a consuming project such as the summer gala, and these tasks didn’t get done, what would happen? Would the house get run into the ground? Would her children become derelicts? In her heart she believed the answer was yes. Her efforts mattered. She threw a load of darks into the machine.

At ten o’clock she tried to do some yoga on the floor of her bedroom. She unrolled a mat and positioned herself in downward dog. The room was filled with sunlight, and being in downward dog felt good. She wondered again about Lock Dixon. If he could see her this second, would he be impressed by her flexibility? (No. Even Claire’s ninety-two-year-old grandmother could do downward dog.) She was too lazy to get herself into another position, and honestly, it had been so long since she’d made it to yoga that she’d forgotten all the positions, anyway. If she tried one now, it would be incorrect and offer no real benefit.

She sat up. Her head was buzzing. She hadn’t eaten anything; she had forgotten herself. And that was the reason Claire was so thin; it had nothing to do with yoga.

The phone rang. Would it be Lock? One thing about cochairing the summer gala was that the phone would ring and it would be Lock, or Isabelle French—or Matthew!—instead of Jeremy Tate-Friedman, her client from London, telling her he’d had a dream about an orchestra that played instruments made of glass. Would Claire, for the right price, consider making a glass flute, one that actually worked? (Her career had been subject to—indeed, dependent on—the eccentricities of a handful of very wealthy people.) Claire checked the caller ID: it was Siobhan. But Claire didn’t pick up the phone; she had too much on her mind. It was still Lock. Okay, this was pitiful. The man was following her around her own house like a ghost who had unfinished business with the living. Why? What did he want? He wanted her to create a museum-quality piece of glass for the auction. He wanted her to burst out of retirement, like a woman jumping out of a cake, in front of a thousand paying guests. Break the shackles of motherhood, emerge from the cave where she had been shutting herself away like a hermit. She had been out of the hot shop for months and — Just admit it, Claire!—she missed it. A part of her yearned for it. People like Jeremy Tate-Friedman called, and Elsa, the woman who owned the shop Transom, called. (Would Claire produce another Jungle Series? The vases had sold so quickly!) But these people did not provide the right impetus for Claire to return to the hot shop. Lock, somehow, had pushed a different button. He had used the element of surprise. He read GlassArt; he knew not only her piece at the Whitney but her piece at the Yankee Ingenuity Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, as well. He appreciated her work, and hence he appreciated her, Claire, in a way that few other people did. Who would have guessed? Lock Dixon was a fan. He had always made her nervous; Claire thought this was because of Daphne and the accident.

But maybe not.

Claire wondered if Lock Dixon had ever seen the inside of a hot shop. If he was willing to pay fifty thousand dollars for a piece of glass, then he must know something about the craft. Maybe he had been to Simon Pearce; there were two studios now where you could watch the guys blow out a few goblets, then go upstairs to a fancy restaurant and eat a warm goat cheese salad with candied pecans. Or maybe Lock had seen glass blown in Colonial Williamsburg or Sturbridge Village, or on a school trip to Corning. She would ask him the next time they were alone. Would they ever be alone again? Why did she care? Did she find Lock Dixon attractive? Well, he was twenty pounds overweight and balding on top, so no, he wasn’t Derek Jeter or Brad Pitt, and he wasn’t a twenty-year-old hunk, like the kid who worked for Santos Rubbish. He wasn’t as handsome as Jason (who had a washboard stomach and a thick head of blond hair). But Lock had nice eyes—and that smile. There had been something between them last night in the office—a connection, an energy—that had not been present during lunch at the yacht club or at the handful of board meetings that Claire had attended. A spark, something that caught fire and smoldered. Claire’s interest, her desire. But why? This was the kind of question Siobhan loved: Why this person and not that person? Why now and not before? Why did love, lust, romance, even the real, deep, and true stuff you felt for your husband, always mellow (and then, in some cases, sour)? And if the mellowing was inevitable, did that mean you simply gave up that tingling, stomach- swooping, giddy, God-I’m-in-love-or-lust feeling forever? Were you left with your hopeless crush on George Clooney or the UPS man? Siobhan could talk about this stuff for hours as she filled phyllo with lobster meat and fresh corn, but until today, these questions had never interested Claire. Until today, she couldn’t have cared less.

Claire’s hot shop was locked up like Fort Knox. When she worked, the furnace ran night and day, and so the term “hot shop” was something of an understatement. Jason called it the Belly of Hell. Jason had built the hot shop for Claire because there was no glass studio on the island. He’d started out reluctantly. One expensive hobby, he called it. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on the pot furnace, the glory hole, the punties, the benches, the molds, the shaping tools, the colored frit, the annealer. A small fortune. Eventually, however, Jason became fascinated with the construction of the hot shop. He was building the only glassblowing studio on the island. For his wife, who was trained in the craft; she had a degree from RISD! She could make things—vases and goblets and sculpture—and sell them. Now the hot shop had paid for itself, and Claire had made enough money from the whims of her kooky patrons to pay off the car and plump the kids’ college funds.