What could she say? He was right. She was amazed he’d noticed.

“I need you to stick with me for six more weeks,” she said. “And then it will be done. Over.”

“You could have died, Claire,” he said. “If Pan hadn’t checked on you when she got home from the beach, I would be picking out your casket right now.”

“I’m sorry . . .”

“You’re sorry? You were unconscious, Claire. Knocking yourself out, literally, over the goddamned chandelier.”

Two arms left, Claire thought involuntarily. Then she thought, He’s right. I’ve been brainwashed. I am not myself. How to return to myself? Quit? Leave Lock? Tell Isabelle to take her “Petite Soirée” and go to hell?

The door opened and the doctor swung in. “Well,” he said, “I hear you’re lucky to be alive!”

They were at an impasse. Claire promised Jason she would stay out of the hot shop for one week, but doing so pushed her past her self-imposed deadline. And she only had two arms left—just two! She could do it, she knew she could; she had pulled two perfect arms in an hour and she had it down now, the formula, the rhythm. She said to Pan, “I’m going to work for one hour. Will you check on me in an hour?”

Pan touched her front pocket, where she kept her cell phone. Claire knew this meant that Jason had told Pan to call him if Claire tried something like this.

“Never mind,” Claire said. “I won’t work.”

But of course she sneaked out only seconds after Pan pulled out of the driveway to take the kids to the beach. She found the door to the hot shop secured with a padlock.

She called Jason at work. “You’re a jerk, you know that?”

“You saw the lock?” he said.

She hung up. She nearly called Siobhan, but Siobhan would take Jason’s side—she had already taken Jason’s side, saying, when she dropped off Tupperware containers of chicken salad and marinated cucumbers, It’s not worth what you’re doing to yourself, Claire.

So Claire called Lock, even though Lock was in the office and not free to talk. She told him what had happened—the chandelier, the heat, the sweat, the fall, the hospital, the fight, the padlock.

“He’s a dictator,” she said of Jason. “He thinks he’s my father. He’s not my father.”

“No,” Lock said. “He’s not.”

“Keeping me out of my own hot shop, keeping me away from my work, is wrong.”

“Wrong,” Lock said.

“What am I supposed to do?” Claire said.

“Leave.”

She looked out the window at her shackled hot shop. “And go where?”

Lock was quiet.

Right, it was easy for him to take her side—anything to put him in opposition to Jason, anything to make Jason the bad guy and him the hero. Okay, now Claire was defending Jason. Jason wasn’t letting her in the hot shop because he cared about her well-being. The chandelier was making her crazy. She did need a break. Leave? And do what? Fly to Ibiza? It was unfair for Lock to tell her to leave when he had no intention of leaving himself.

“Claire!” There was a voice in the hallway. Truly incredible: Jason was home, at two o’clock in the afternoon.

“I have to go,” Claire said, and she hung up.

She opened the bedroom door and found Jason standing there, his face a livid purple, his arm outstretched and trembling. In his palm was the key.

“Here you go,” he said. “Take it.”

She took it. He turned on his heels and marched out.

She held the key until it started to sweat in her hand. This was what she wanted. Jason was trying to make her feel like it was wrong. It was wrong; all of it was wrong. She had been abducted. Where was the old Claire? Missing, dead, gone. She closed her eyes, and the thought that came to her was this: Two arms left. She filled a thermos with ice water and headed out back.

Forty-nine minutes and eighteen tries into it, she had her seventh arm. Into the annealer! One more arm! She was giddy with her impending triumph. Tomorrow was July 8 and Isabelle would arrive and Claire would be . . . done! The backbreaking work would be finished. Blowing the cups out would be as easy as blowing bubbles with the kids on the back porch.

Claire went back to the pot furnace and took another gather. The first key to success was getting the right amount of gather on the punty. This looked perfect. Claire took the gather to the marvering table and rolled it in the precious pink frit. The gather cooled against the table, so Claire went to the glory hole and reheated; then she took the gather to the bench and rolled it, grabbed her pliers and pulled and bent and twisted and rolled. She went back to the glory hole, got the piece good and hot again, tweaked it some more. She thought of the swoop she felt in her stomach when she saw Lock—that swoop was what she wanted to re-create with this glass. She thought the arm looked pretty good, pretty close . . . she heated it up, she tweaked it a little more, and feeling optimistic, she pierced the arm lengthwise with a long needle—this was delicate surgery, a procedure that had ruined dozens of good arms—so that there would be a thin tunnel through which to thread the wires. It was impossible to tell how good the arm was, however, until she held it up to the globe. Impossible that she would have pulled two perfect arms in a row—but yes! When the piece had cooled enough to pick up with tongs, Claire saw it was the missing piece of the puzzle. It fit—like Cinderella and the goddamned glass slipper. Impossible, but true!