Siobhan scooted down Federal Street, charged with an energy it was hard to describe. She was going to catch her best friend at . . . what?

Siobhan saw Claire tripping down the front steps of the church. Siobhan checked her watch. Four thirty. Mass was at five, but Claire was leaving the church, not going into it, and every good Catholic knew there were only three reasons to go to church in the middle of the afternoon: wedding, funeral, confession. Siobhan didn’t see a bride and groom, nor did she see a hearse.

“Claire?”

Claire whipped around. Guilty. Caught.

“Hey,” she said weakly.

Siobhan glanced, pointedly, at the church. “What are you doing?”

Claire said, “What are you doing? God, town is dead.”

“Were you at confession?” Siobhan asked.

Claire looked behind her at the church, as though surprised to find it there.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was. You know, I try to get J.D. and Ottilie to go, but they won’t, so I figure, lead by example or whatever. A little repenting never hurt anyone.”

Claire was the easiest person in the world to read. Now she had two hot spots on her cheeks. Siobhan, girl sleuth, had another clue. Although she had been raised in County Cork, and Claire had been raised in godforsaken coastal New Jersey, their Catholicism was the same. Siobhan hadn’t been to confession since she was twelve years old, and she knew Claire hadn’t, either. It would have to be a pretty big sin to send her there.

“I’m out shopping,” Siobhan said. “Do you want to go somewhere and get a drink? Do you want to talk?”

“No,” Claire said. “I can’t.”

“Just one drink. Come on. I feel like I never see you anymore.”

“I have to get home,” Claire said. “Jason, the kids, dinner. You know what my life is like.”

Siobhan nodded, they kissed, and Claire boogied for her car. Siobhan headed around the corner, ostensibly to check for “something pretty” at Erica Wilson. But she really just moved out of sight so she could catch her breath from the shock. Claire at confession.

You know what my life is like.

But did she?

There was a song the kids liked about having a “bad day,” and when it came on the radio, Claire was required to turn up the volume, and the three older children sang along while Zack cried. Claire hated the song; it taunted her. The spring—a season of rebirth and new hope—was turning out to be a disaster for her. She had one bad day after another, after another.

Take, for example, what was going on in the hot shop. For months she had been trying to get started on the pulled-taffy chandelier for the gala auction. But it was all false starts and wasted time. She blew out a beautiful globe, which was to be the center of the chandelier, the body; it was colored a transcendental pink, the most luscious pink Claire had ever achieved because of the painstaking way she had crushed the frit with a mortar and pestle. The globe was perfect, it was Platonic, it was as thin and wondrous as the Bubbles; she was back on track, hitting her stride. But then the perfect, Platonic globe shattered in the annealer, and when Claire saw this, she cried for three days. She cried with Jason; she cried with Lock. Both of them pretended to get it, but they didn’t get it, not really, and she was vexed because they both, ultimately, expressed the same sentiment. It’s okay. You’ll do another one, and the second one will be even better. They used the same tone of voice; they were, in those moments, the same man. Disturbing. Claire tried to explain that it wasn’t just the globe that was broken; it was her confidence and her will. She did, however, try again, and the result was probably just as good, lacking only the luster of perfection that the first globe had acquired in Claire’s mind. Toward this second globe she acted like an overprotective mother. When it was cool, she set it gingerly in a crate filled with straw, and from time to time she revered it, like it was Baby Jesus lying in his manger.

With the body of the chandelier finished, she moved on to the arms. The arms of the chandelier had to arch and curve. They would have the same pulled-taffy nature as the candlesticks she had made so long ago for Mr. Fred Bulrush—all that twisty, colored glass—but they had to fall like tendrils from the globe, they had to drip. That meant Claire had to pull each arm by hand and get it to curve and bend just the right way, twisting it at the same time. It was impossible, it was beyond her, like certain positions in yoga; she couldn’t make the glass do what she wanted it to do. She tried sixty times to get one graceful, arabesquing arm, and when she finally had it, the one arm, she wept some more because she could see how incredible the chandelier would be if she ever finished it, but she wasn’t sure she had the patience to make seven more arms. In fact, Claire pulled another arm beautifully within her next ten tries, but because she was working by hand and not with a mold, this second arm did not correspond with the first. The angle of the curve was too sharp; if she attached these two arms to the globe now, one arm would look broken. More tears.

Lock said, “There was no guaranteeing that it was going to come easily. In fact, one of the reasons this piece is so valuable is that it is so difficult. We’re paying for your blood, sweat, and tears.”

Claire nearly swore at him. This was a piece for an auction, it was a donation, and it was consuming all of her time. It had been a mistake to return to the hot shop; she had lost her touch, the chandelier was beyond her, and yet it was the only thing she wanted to do. So there you had it: she had set herself an unattainable goal, and all it brought her was frustration and heartbreak.