“I’m worried about you. Three days now you’ve gone around looking not so good.” She blindly patted the chunk of clay into a ball, her stern gaze on Maggie. “Flat-out bad, actually.” She fell into her seat, slapped the clay onto the wheel, and planted her hands on her knees. “I think I’d better call your mom.”

“Oh no.” She straightened, alarmed. “Don’t call Mom.”

The aunt answered with a disapproving hum and plunged her hands into the bucket of water. After stepping on the pedal and shooting the wheel-head into a whirring spin, she began centering. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Maggie shook her head. She did not want to talk about it, about any of it: Jane’s situation or Jane’s emails or how Maggie couldn’t pull her shit together long enough to manage a reply. Talking about Jane was too much like talking about herself.

And that was the whole problem.

“You’re a mess. Either jumpy or comatose, but continuously morose. Here we have a stretch of warm October weather, and you don’t spend a single hour outside beachcombing.” Without smiling, she quipped, “And everyone knows how much Margaret loves her beach glass. What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

Wren jerked up her chin, like a header, shooting Maggie’s lie somewhere else, then she just waited, eyebrows raised.

Maggie hunched lower in the clay-smeared chair.

“Come on. Tell me. Maybe I can—”

A thud resounded from the mixing room, followed by an explosive “Shit!”

“Eek.” Wren leaned back from the spinning wheel and called, “What happened?”

Sam appeared in the backroom doorway. “My project.” He clutched his head. “I dropped the base of it!”

The aunt returned to the wheel, her expression decidedly unsympathetic. “I warned you, and after all this time, you ought to know better. You can’t transport unfired sculptures.” To Maggie: “Until it comes out of a kiln, clay’s basically mud. Wet mud, dry mud”—she shrugged—“doesn’t take anything to bend or crack or chip it.” She opened the centered mound. “Sam, Sam, Sam…” Her head wagged. “You need to finish that project here.”

“How can I?” He stomped into the studio. “I watch Kate every evening now. That’s my only time to work on the stupid thing, so I have to get it home. It’s not smart, bringing her over to the studio and letting her run around and play, just so I can sculpt. Too many things in here could hurt a little girl.”

Maggie grunted. Or vice versa.

The aunt ran the wire under the bowl. “I can help watch her.”

“You’ve got a deadline on that thing.” He swatted the air in the direction of the closed damp box. “I can’t ask you to babysit.” His exhalation carried a sound that was like a whimper. “You’re way too busy.”

The aunt murmured something about making time and chipping in.