She could not believe she was doing this. She glanced back at the house, stealthily, feeling like a criminal as she unlocked the heavy metal door. But why? There was nothing wrong with blowing glass again. Pan would take care of Zack, and the other kids were at school all day, so . . . why not? But there was guilt. It had to do with her fall. Claire should never have subjected herself to the heat when she was so far along in her pregnancy. She should have been drinking more water. The doctor had warned her! And it was Zack who had paid the price. There’s something wrong with him.

Still, she stepped inside. She was an alcoholic opening the liquor cabinet; she was a junkie visiting her dealer. But that was ridiculous! She had, after all, come into the hot shop plenty of times in the past year—to get tools, to go over her books with the accountants, to show Pan the pieces she’d made as a beginner—but Claire had never come in with the intention of starting up again. When she turned off the heat, she did so in the name of her family. She had four kids, a husband, and a home that needed her.

Claire stood in the center of the shop and looked around. Just admit it! She was dying to get back in there.

Claire’s attraction to molten glass was atavistic; it was coded somewhere on her DNA. She was drawn to the flame, to the unsafe temperatures, to the blinding light. A blob of molten glass on the end of a blowpipe contained her life’s meaning, even though it was hot and dangerous. She had burned herself and cut herself too many times to remember; she had scars with stories she’d forgotten. But she loved working with glass the way she loved her children—unconditionally, and despite the real possibility of failure. Molten glass fell to the floor, she marvered incorrectly and came out with something lopsided, she blew a piece too thin, she necked incorrectly and could not transfer the piece to the punty, she cooled a piece too quickly and it shattered in the annealer. There was nothing about glass that was forgiving; it was a craft, but also a science. It took precision, concentration, practice.

She found a half-empty sketchbook on her worktable. Museum-quality piece? The piece at the Whitney was a sculpture of thinly blown-out spheres—so thinly blown that they had to be placed in a soundproof room—all of which held hints of prismatic color and interlocked like soap bubbles. The sculpture was called Bubbles III. (Bubbles I and II were housed in the private galleries of Chick and Caroline Klaussen and Chick Klaussen sat on the board of the Whitney.) The Yankee Ingenuity Museum displayed a set of nesting vases with differently shaped openings. When you looked down into the vases, it was like looking into a kaleidoscope. Claire had done the vases in sea colors—turquoise, cobalt, jade, celadon. Claire and Jason and the kids had traveled to Vermont to see the vases on display. The vases were lovely and well displayed in the small, rustic museum, though they didn’t compare to the Bubbles at the Whitney. Claire couldn’t do another in the Bubbles series for the auction; that would be like Leonardo repainting the Mona Lisa. But Claire could possibly create another set of nesting vases. Would they be worth fifty thousand dollars?

The door opened and the room filled with breeze. Claire turned. Pan stood in the doorway. Claire felt like she’d been caught.

“Where’s Zack?” Claire said.

“He sleep,” Pan said.

“I’m thinking about working again,” Claire said.

Pan nodded. She was still very brown from the summer. She wore a black tank top and khaki capri pants and a thin silver chain with a tiny bell on it around her neck. Claire had paid twice already to have this chain repaired after Zack had yanked it off. Claire suggested Pan not wear the chain while she was working, but Pan ignored this advice and that was fine. The chain and the bell were part of Pan’s persona, part of her magic. Pan was short and lithe, and her glossy black hair was cut into a rounded pageboy. She was both adorable and androgynous. With the silver chain and the tiny, tinkling bell, she reminded Claire of a wood sprite.

“What do you think?” Claire asked.

Pan tilted her head.

“About me working?”

Pan shrugged. Possibly she didn’t understand the question, and certainly she didn’t understand what Claire’s working again would entail.

Claire shook her head. “Never mind,” she said.

Pan left, but Claire lingered for another few moments on the bench, paging through her sketchbook. Once upon a time, she had made an elaborate pair of candlesticks for Mr. Fred Bulrush of San Francisco. The pulled-taffy candlesticks. She had come upon the design by accident, holding on to the gather with tweezers while rolling the blowpipe; she had twisted and pulled the molten glass, then rolled it into blue and purple frit that she’d scattered on the marvering table. She was like a kid with clay, and she thought she’d end up with a kid’s mess, but the colors blended beautifully and the form cooled a bit and Claire recognized it as a candlestick stem. She added a foot and blew out a small bowl, and when it came out of the annealer, she thought, This is really cool. It looked, to Claire, like a psychedelic Popsicle. It was Jason who thought it looked like pulled taffy. He liked it as much as Claire did, but then he said, What are you going to do with one candlestick?

And Claire thought, Right. I’ll never in a million years be able to make another one.

She tried again and got close—the color wasn’t quite identical and the twistiness was off—but that was what made it art. She took a picture of the candlesticks and sent it to Mr. Fred Bulrush, a mysteriously wealthy man—a former associate of Timothy Leary’s—who loved Claire’s work because he believed it contained what he called “the elation and pain” of her soul. Bulrush paid twenty-five hundred dollars for the pair.