The bell above the studio door gave a thin, brassy note when Elena pushed it open, the sound swallowed almost at once by the hush inside. Dust moved in the slant of grey light from a single high window. The room beyond was narrow, deep, and lined on both sides with wooden shelves that bowed under the weight of half-finished pieces: a bell jar clouded with bloom, a fish with a melted spine, a vase the colour of weak tea whose rim had collapsed inward during some failed attempt. The floor was concrete, cracked in places and patched with putty that had yellowed to the shade of old bone.
Dorian Cresswell stood at the far bench with his back to the door, working a rod over a small flame. He did not turn at the bell. He turned at the scrape of Elena's boot sole on the concrete, and when he did, he lifted the rod from the flame and set it on the iron rest with the unhurried precision of a man who knew exactly how hot the metal stayed after the fire was gone.
"Miss Marwood," he said.
Elena stopped two paces inside the threshold. She had not given her name. She had not spoken. She had only walked in and been recognised.
He smiled, a small, contained thing that did not reach his eyes. There was soot on the cuff of his charcoal coat, and his hands were wrapped in pale leather that had gone grey at the fingertips. Behind him the flame guttered and recovered, a blue heart in the gloom.
"Forgive me," he said, still smiling. "Your name precedes you. I am Dorian Cresswell. I collect glass. I have, in fact, made something of a study of the Hollis technique." He gestured to the shelves without looking at them. "This studio is the last working one on the island. I confess I had hoped to find it occupied."
Elena did not move closer. She kept her hands at her sides, where the door was still within reach.
"You have me at a disadvantage," she said. "I came here to find the door locked and the windows shuttered. Instead I find a man who knows my name and knows this room."
"I know this room because I have bought from it." He tilted his head, studying her the way one studies the inside of a vessel for flaws. "Several times, in fact. Through intermediaries. Your mentor, Margaret Hollis, was not fond of visitors."
Elena felt the name land in her chest the way a stone lands in still water. She kept her face still. Margaret had never spoken of a collector. Margaret had spoken of very little in those last months, and what she had said had been mostly about heat, and timing, and the way a gather cools.
"Margaret died eight months ago," Elena said. "Whatever you bought from her, the receipts will be with her effects."
"I have the receipts." He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and produced a small leather wallet, which he opened with one hand to display a single card the colour of cream. "The most recent was for a commission she did not live to finish."
Elena looked at the card. She knew what the printing on the front said without being able to read it from this distance. It was the kind of card Margaret had kept in a cigar box on the workbench, the kind she had handed out to no one in the years Elena had known her.
"You were a friend of hers," Elena said. The word felt wrong in her mouth, too soft for what she was seeing in his face.
"I was a patron," he said. "A friend implies a warmth Margaret did not offer me. I admired her work. I wished to possess a particular piece. I made her an offer for it. She refused. I made her a better offer. She refused again." He closed the wallet and returned it to his pocket. "She was, in the end, quite stubborn about that piece."
"And yet you are here," Elena said, "in her studio, working her glass."
"It is her successor's studio now." His gaze moved over her face with a patience that felt like a hand on her throat. "I read the notice in the parish register. Miss Elena Marwood, formerly of Penzance, apprenticed to Margaret Hollis for nine years. Sole heir of the workshop and its contents." He paused, letting the words settle. "I have been hoping you would come."
The flame behind him hissed. A drop of gather fell from the rod he had set aside and struck the iron rest with a sound like a fingernail tapped on glass. Elena watched the drop flatten and orange at the edges.
"I have not come to sell anything," she said.
"No," he agreed. "You have come because the studio door was not locked, and because you are, I think, a woman who walks into rooms that ought to be empty. Margaret was the same." He took a step to the side, towards the bench, and his shoulder passed through a column of the high window's light. The dust turned gold around him. "There is a piece she was making when she died. You will have seen it. A vessel, unfinished, wrapped in cloth on the third shelf from the back. Do not bother to deny it. The cloth has been disturbed since I was last here."
Elena's mouth went dry. She had seen the cloth. She had not unwrapped it.
"What is in the cloth," she said, "is not yours."
"It was never mine to buy. That was Margaret's position, and she was immovable on it." He folded his arms. The leather of his gloves creaked. "But she is gone, Miss Marwood. And the piece remains. And the studio has a new mistress who has, by all reports, spent eight months failing to finish what Margaret began."
The room was very quiet. Outside, somewhere down the lane, a gull screamed, and the sound came through the walls thin and sharp as broken glass.
"You have been talking to people about me," Elena said.
"I have been talking to people about Margaret." His voice was even. "You are, understandably, part of that conversation."
Elena looked past him at the bench. There were three rods laid out on it, sorted by length. There was a punty rod with a clear gather on the end, still soft enough to deform if touched. There was a pair of jacks laid side by side. There was a block of wood, charred at one corner, that smelled of beeswax and something older, something that had been soaked into the grain over years. She knew that smell. She had breathed it in Margaret's workshop for nine years. It was the smell of Margaret's bench, not this man's.
"You have been practising," Elena said.
"I have been teaching myself." He did not smile this time. "Badly. I have no gift for it. But I wished to understand the technique, and one understands a technique poorly if one does not attempt it. Margaret would not allow me into this room. You, I suspect, will not allow me either. But I thought it was worth asking."
"Asking what," Elena said, though she knew.
He looked at her directly then, and for the first time she saw something behind the composure, something that was not amusement and was not patience. It was hunger, the kind that had nothing to do with the stomach.
"Ask you to let me see the unfinished piece," he said. "Ask you to let me watch you finish it. I will pay you for the privilege. I will pay you a sum that will keep this studio running for a decade. I will pay you enough that you never have to take another commission from another stranger to keep the roof on."
The number he named was so large that for a breath she could not place it against anything real. It belonged to a different island, the kind of island where people bought boats instead of repairing them.
"No," Elena said.
He did not seem surprised. He inclined his head, a small motion, and the hunger in his eyes did not lessen.
"You have not heard the number," he said.
"I heard it." She took a step back towards the door. "It is not a question of the number."
"It is always a question of the number, Miss Marwood. The only question is whether one is honest about it." He turned back to the bench and picked up the rod with the gather, balancing it between his palms. The gather swayed, orange at the core, clear at the skin. "Margaret refused me for eight years. She refused me when she was well and when she was not. She refused me when the money would have paid for the operation that might have saved her life."
Elena's hand found the door frame.
"Do not speak of Margaret," she said.
"I am speaking of Margaret." His voice was very soft. "I am speaking of a woman who chose her pride over her survival, and who left you, her heir, a piece of work you cannot finish and a studio you cannot afford to keep. I am speaking of a woman who loved her craft more than she loved the people who would inherit it."
The flame behind him flared. For a moment the room was bright enough to read the labels on the jars on the back shelf, and Elena saw, on the highest of them, a small glass fish the colour of sea ice. Margaret had made it the year Elena arrived. It had been a gift for a buyer in Norway who had never come to collect it. It had sat on that shelf ever since, gathering dust.
"You knew her," Elena said, "and she did not let you in."
"I knew her," he agreed, "and she did not let me in. And now she is dead, and I am still here, and you are still here, and the piece is still here, wrapped in its cloth." He set the rod down again. The gather slumped and began to cool. "Go home. Think about it. The offer will stand."
Elena stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame and the sea air on her neck, and she did not move for a long moment. Then she stepped back into the lane and pulled the door shut behind her. The bell gave its thin note again, and this time the sound carried out into the street, where a woman walking a dog looked up at the studio window and then looked away.
Dorian Cresswell stood in the studio and listened to the bell fade. Then he crossed to the third shelf from the back, where a bundle of pale linen sat wrapped around a shape he had not been allowed to touch in eight years. He did not unwrap it. He stood with his gloved hands at his sides and looked at it, and the hunger in his face deepened into something that was no longer patience.
From the lane, the gull screamed again. The tide was turning. Somewhere on the island, a woman named Petra Vance was walking towards the same studio with a different errand in mind, and did not yet know that the door had been opened and shut again in the last quarter hour.
The lane between the sea wall and the row of cottages held the late afternoon light like a shallow bowl, and Petra Vance walked through it with the kind of purposeful stride she used when she had already decided to be annoyed. Her canvas bag thumped against her hip. Inside it, wrapped in tissue, sat a slim ledger she had pulled from the archive that morning: the original acquisition book from the old glassworks, the one Margaret Hollis had donated to the town library in 1997 with a note that read, in her careful copperplate, For those who come after. Petra had signed it in and out so many times over the years that the spine had softened, and the tissue had begun to fray at the corners.
She had not planned to come to the studio today. She had planned to spend the afternoon cross-referencing the ledger against the insurance valuations Margaret had filed with the historical society, because something in those valuations had been bothering her for a week, a discrepancy so small it could have been a clerical error and so consistent it could not. Then Elena Marwood had telephoned at half past two, voice tight, asking if Petra had a moment to look at something, and Petra had said she had several moments, and had walked out of the library without locking the front door, which she would later regret.
The studio door was shut. The bell above it was silent. Petra stood on the step and looked at the paint, at the hairline crack in the lower pane, at the faint salt bloom on the iron handle, and thought, with the unkind precision that was her particular gift, that Elena Marwood was a woman who had inherited a beautiful mess and was only now beginning to understand the shape of it.
She lifted the knocker and let it fall.
Inside, she heard the faint complaint of floorboards, then nothing. She lifted the knocker again and let it fall twice more, because Elena had asked, and Elena did not ask lightly.
The door opened.
Dorian Cresswell stood in the aperture with one gloved hand on the frame and his hat in the other, as if he had been in the middle of leaving. The studio behind him smelled of cooling gather and something older, the dust of years. On the bench nearest the door, a rod lay across the yoke with a sag of amber glass at its tip, already losing its glow.
"Miss Vance," he said, and the pleasure in his voice was so precisely calibrated that Petra, who had spent twenty years cataloguing the lies of small towns, felt her jaw tighten. "I was just on my way out. Elena and I have been having a pleasant conversation about her future."
"I'm sure," Petra said. She did not move from the step. "Is Elena in?"
"She stepped out for some air. She'll be back, I expect. The sea air steadies the nerves." He tilted his head. "Were we expecting you?"
"Elena telephoned me. She asked me to come."
"Did she." The hat turned once in his hand. "Then I shall leave you to it. I have an engagement in town that I am, regrettably, already late for."
"You are," Petra agreed. "Good afternoon, Mr Cresswell."
She stepped aside to let him pass. He did not pass. For a moment they stood on the threshold in that particular deadlock of people who have known each other long enough to be polite and not long enough to be kind, and then Dorian Cresswell smiled, a small expression that lived entirely in his mouth, and came down the step past her, close enough that she caught the wool of his coat and the faint, expensive scent of him.
He did not look back.
Petra watched him turn the corner of the lane and disappear towards the seafront, and she counted to thirty before she went inside, because she had learned, in twenty years of keeping other people's secrets, that the most dangerous thing in any room was the moment after a particular man had left it.
The studio was dim and close. The gather on the rod had gone opaque. Petra crossed to the workbench and looked at it without touching, then at the cloth bundle on the third shelf, and her breath caught in a way she would later describe, in the privacy of her own kitchen, as purely professional.
She did not unwrap it.
She stood with her bag on her hip and her hand on the ledger through the tissue, and she waited, and she listened, and the studio ticked and cooled around her in the way that empty rooms do when they have been holding a conversation they are not yet ready to give up.
The door opened again.
Elena came in with the wind in her hair and her cheeks pink from the lane, and she stopped when she saw who was waiting.
"Petra."
"You telephoned."
"I did. I thought you'd be later." Elena pulled the door shut and leaned against it. "He was here."
"I saw him leave."
"He came to make me an offer for the piece."
Petra's mouth thinned. "Of course he did."
"He said Margaret visited him. The week before she died." Elena's voice was careful, as if she were handling something that might break. "He said she came to his house in the evening. He said she was trembling. He said she told him she had witnessed a sealing."
The studio ticked. A gull screamed outside, and the sound came in thin and high through the cracked pane.
"A sealing," Petra repeated.
"That's what he said."
"Of what, did he say?"
"He didn't say. He said I should think about the offer, and then he let himself out, and then I telephoned you."
Petra crossed to the bench and set her bag down on the only clear corner. She took out the ledger, still in its tissue, and laid it on the wood. She did not open it.
"Sit down," she said. "Tell me exactly what he said, from the beginning, and don't leave anything out, not even the parts you think don't matter."
Elena sat on the high stool by the wheel. The gather on the rod caught the last of the light from the window and held it for a moment, then let it go.
"He came in at half past two," Elena said. "I had just lit the glory hole. He knocked, which he never does, he usually lets himself in with the key Margaret gave him, and when I opened the door he was standing there with his hat in his hand and his gloves on, which is how he always stands, and he said, 'I have come to make you an offer you will find difficult to refuse.'"
"His words."
"His words. Or near enough. He smiled when he said it. He smiled the whole time."
Petra opened the ledger and turned to the page she had marked with a slip of paper. "The acquisition book. Margaret donated it in 1997. There are forty-three entries. They go from 1948 to 1986. I have cross-referenced them against the insurance valuations Margaret filed with the historical society in 2003, and there are seven discrepancies."
"Seven."
"Seven. Small ones. A guinea here. A crown there. A piece entered as a vase and valued as a bowl. The kind of thing you would expect from a clerk in a hurry. Except the discrepancies are not random." Petra ran her finger down the column. "They form a pattern. Every fifth entry, the value is adjusted downward by a fixed amount. Every fifth entry, without exception, from 1963 onwards."
Elena leaned forward. "What does that mean?"
"It means that for twenty-three years, someone was quietly shaving the recorded value of a piece in every batch. It means that either Margaret was being cheated by her own bookkeepers, which I find difficult to believe, or she was cheating someone else, which I find impossible to believe, or she was adjusting the value of a particular piece in a way that only she and the person she was adjusting it for would understand."
"In every fifth batch."
"In every fifth batch. And here is the thing, Elena." Petra turned the page. "The pattern begins in 1963. The year the glassworks moved from the old quayside building to the site by the cliffs."
"The site of the cave."
"The site of the cave. The site of the chamber Margaret would not let anyone enter. The site of the piece Dorian Cresswell has spent fifteen years trying to acquire." Petra closed the ledger. "I think Margaret was keeping two sets of records. I think the public ledger is the one she donated to the library. I think the private ledger is the one that explains the pattern."
"And the sealing?"
"The sealing," Petra said, "is something Margaret witnessed in that chamber, and something she could not bring herself to write down, and something she told Dorian Cresswell about, the week before she died, because she was frightened, and because he was the only person on this island she believed would understand."
The studio ticked. The gather on the rod gave a faint, musical creak as it contracted.
"You haven't told the police any of this," Elena said.
"I have told the police nothing, because until an hour ago I had nothing to tell. Now I have a piece of a pattern and a collector with a motive and a mentor who died with her boots on in a place she had no reason to be." Petra stood. "I'm going to make a phone call. Then I'm going to walk back to the library and lock the front door, which I did not lock when I came out, and which I am going to have to think about for the rest of the week. Then I'm going to come back here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and you are going to show me the piece."
"I haven't decided to show you the piece."
"You haven't decided to show anyone the piece. You have, however, decided to telephone me at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon because a man you do not trust told you a story you could not verify, and that means you have decided to stop carrying this alone." Petra picked up her bag. "Nine o'clock. Don't unwrap it before I get here. Don't let him in. Don't answer the door to anyone you do not know."
"Petra."
"Yes."
"Why did he tell me?"
"Because he wanted you to know that Margaret told him. Because he wanted you to understand that he is the only person on this island who has been trusted with what she saw. Because he is a man who collects things, Elena, and information is a thing, and he is in the process of acquiring you." Petra opened the door. The bell gave its thin note. "Nine o'clock."
Elena stood in the studio and listened to the bell fade, and then to the footsteps in the lane, and then to the silence that came after, which was not silence at all but the held breath of a room that had just been given a shape it had not asked for. She crossed to the third shelf and looked at the bundle of linen, and she did not unwrap it, and she did not touch it, and she stood with her hands at her sides the way Dorian Cresswell had stood a quarter of an hour before, and the weight in her chest was not grief, or not only grief, but the older, colder weight of a woman who has at last understood that she has been left not with a craft but with a debt.
The gather on the rod gave one last creak, and cracked along its belly, and fell away from the yoke onto the floor in a single amber piece.
Elena did not pick it up.
She turned off the gas at the glory hole, put the tools away in the order Margaret had taught her, locked the front door, and climbed the narrow stairs to the flat above the studio, where she sat at the kitchen table in the last of the light and made a list of the seven people on the island who had a key to the old chamber, and a longer list of the seven people who did not, and a third list, which she crossed out, of the seven things she would have liked to say to Margaret Hollis and now could not, and then she put the kettle on and watched the steam rise into the rafters, and did not think about the sealing, and thought about it the whole evening through.
The key to Elena's flat was on a hook behind the kitchen door, and Petra Vance had a copy because Margaret Hollis had asked her to hold one, twenty-three years ago, in the spring before the spring her lungs gave out, and Petra had refused, because the librarian and the glassblower had quarreled over the matter of a watercolour that Margaret had painted of the harbour wall in 1987 and that Petra had maintained, in writing, was the property of the historical society, and Margaret had maintained, more loudly, was the property of her own brush, and for two years they had not spoken, and then Margaret had asked for the key anyway, in a letter that Petra still kept in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet under R for Regret, and Petra had made the copy on a Tuesday afternoon, and put it in an envelope, and walked it down to the studio in the rain, and slid it under the door without knocking, and gone home, and not mentioned it again.
That was twenty-one years ago, and the key had hung on the hook in Elena's kitchen ever since.
Petra took it down now, at half past seven on a Thursday morning, with the light coming through the curtains in long pale stripes across the linoleum, and she slipped it into her coat pocket, and she pulled on her gloves, and she walked the six streets between her own front door and the lane that ran behind the seafront, where the studio sat with its windows facing the water and its chimney giving off the thinnest possible thread of smoke, which meant that Elena was up, and at work, and not to be disturbed.
Petra did not intend to disturb her.
Petra intended to walk along the lane, and past the studio door, and up the three stone steps to the side entrance of the house, and through the side entrance into the back hall, and up the back staircase to the first floor, and along the first floor landing to the door of the room that had been Margaret Hollis's study for the last forty-one years of her life and was now, by the terms of the will that Petra had read and re-read and annotated in the margin, the property of Elena Marwood, and was therefore the property of no one Petra had any business protecting, except that Petra had spent twenty years guarding the records of the people who had lived and died in this town, and she could not stop herself from guarding, it was a habit and a vocation and a kind of disease, and the habit had woken her at six that morning with a feeling in her stomach that she could not name but that she recognised, because she had felt it once before, on the morning after the storm of 2003, when she had come to the library and found the door ajar and three drawers of parish records face down on the floor and the window of the reading room standing open to the rain.
The feeling had a name, and the name was intrusion.
She did not knock at the studio door. She did not look in through the front window. She walked past with her head down and her collar up and her breath making small white clouds in the salt air, and she turned the corner onto the lane, and she mounted the three stone steps, and she let herself in through the side entrance, and she stood in the back hall for a moment and listened.
The house was quiet. The back staircase was quiet. The first floor landing was quiet, except for a faint ticking from the clock in the back bedroom, which Elena kept wound but never opened, because the glass front had cracked and Margaret had not replaced it.
Petra went along the landing and put her hand on the door of the study, and the door opened under her palm, which it should not have done, because Elena was careful with locks, Elena had been careful with locks since the week after the funeral, when someone had left a wreath of black glass beads on the front step and Elena had found it at six in the morning and had stood holding it for a long time and had not been able to say whose work it was or what it meant.
The door opened inward, and the room beyond was not right.
Petra did not step in at once. She stood on the landing with her hand still on the frame and her eyes adjusting to the dimness, because the curtains were half drawn and the morning light came in only along the bottom edge of the window, in a thin bright line that fell across the carpet and stopped at the leg of the desk, and the rest of the room was in shadow, and the smell that came out of the room was the smell she had been smelling all week, the linseed and the chalk and the old paper, but with something else underneath it, something sharp and chemical, something she had not smelled in this house since the autumn of 2015 when the boy from the boatyard had come to mend the gutter and had spilled a tin of marine paint on the back path and Elena had made him clean it up with turpentine and had kept him at it until the fumes had made him sick.
Turpentine. Mineral spirits. The undernote of a paint that had not yet dried.
Petra stepped into the room.
The desk had been rifled. Not ransacked, not the work of someone in a fury, but rifled, the careful work of someone who had known what they were looking for and had looked for it with patience and with gloves and with the particular kind of love that a collector has for the thing he collects. The drawers were shut, but they were not quite flush with the frame, and the surface of the desk was bare except for a single sheet of writing paper that had not been there on Tuesday, when Petra had come up to measure the room for the shelf she was planning to build for the ledgers. The paper was creased, as though it had been folded and unfolded, and on it, in pencil, in a hand Petra recognised and had hoped never to see again in this house, was a single line:
She kept the best one for herself.
The pen had rested on the paper. The eraser end was stained. The pencil itself was not Margaret's; Margaret had not owned a pencil with a flat shade since 1994. The pencil was a soft 4B, the kind that draughtsmen used, the kind that left a mark like smoke on a clean page.
Petra picked up the pencil and put it in her pocket.
She turned to the shelf above the desk, where Margaret had kept, in a long row of blown glass, the seven figurines that she had made between 1971 and 2003, the figures of the seven virtues and the seven vices and the one, at the centre, that she had never named and that Elena had been trying to finish for six years. The seven virtues were intact. The seven vices were intact. The unnamed figure at the centre was intact. But two of the supporting pieces were gone. Two of the small blown figures, the ones that Margaret had called the Witnesses, the ones that she had made in the winter of 1998 to flank the central piece, the ones that had no face and no name and that Elena had wrapped in linen and put on the third shelf of the studio and not unwrapped since the morning of the funeral. They were not on the shelf. The shelf was bare at their places, and the dust on the wood was disturbed in two clean ovals, and the floor beneath the shelf was clean, and the windowsill was clean, and the only thing out of place, in the whole careful rifling of the room, was a single smear of wet paint on the underside of the second shelf, where someone had knelt or crouched and had leaned a hand against the wood to steady himself and had not noticed that the hand was wet, or had noticed and had not cared.
The paint was still wet. It was still soft to the touch when Petra put her glove against it. It was a deep, cold blue, the colour of the harbour at dusk in November, the colour of the glaze that Dorian Cresswell had specified for the restoration of the reading room lamps at the historical society, the colour that Petra had mixed for him herself, in the back room of the library, in the autumn of 2019, from three parts cobalt and one part tin and a trace of iron oxide that she had not told him about, because she had wanted to see if he would notice, and he had not noticed, and she had known then, in the quiet way she knew things, that Dorian Cresswell did not see the work of other people's hands.
She stood in the study and listened to the clock in the back bedroom tick, and she looked at the smear, and she looked at the two empty places on the shelf, and she looked at the line of pencil on the paper, and she did not move for a long time.
Then she took off her glove and put her bare fingertip into the paint and lifted it and looked at the colour against her skin, and the colour was exact, and the paint was fresh, and the hand that had left it had been in this room no more than twenty minutes before she had arrived.
She put her glove back on. She folded the paper once, along its original crease, and put it in her other pocket. She went back down the back staircase and out through the side entrance and down the three stone steps to the lane, and she did not look toward the studio windows, and she did not look toward the lane's mouth, where, at that moment, a long black car was pulling away from the kerb and turning onto the seafront road with the particular unhurried grace of a vehicle that has no further business in the neighbourhood.
Petra stood on the step and watched it go.
She took out her phone and dialled the number she had dialled only once before, in the spring of 2018, when the watercolour of 1987 had gone missing from the locked case in the reading room and Petra had known, by the shape of the absence, who had taken it.
He answered on the third ring, and he answered with his own name, because that was the kind of man he was.
"Dorian," she said. "It is Petra. I have just been in the study."
A pause. The faint sound of the sea, very far away.
"And?" he said.
"And the Witnesses are gone," she said. "And you have left your hand on my shelf."
The pause this time was longer, and when he spoke again his voice was the same as it had been on Tuesday evening in the library, the voice that sounded as though it were being offered as a gift.
"Petra," he said. "You have always been too clever for your own good."
"Yes," she said. "And you have always been too greedy. Do not come back to this house, Dorian. The lock has been changed."
She hung up before he could answer, and she stood on the step in the salt air with the phone in one hand and the pencil in her pocket and the smear of blue on the inside of her glove, and she walked down the lane to the front of the studio and knocked three times on the front door, in the rhythm that Margaret had taught her, the rhythm that Elena would recognise, and the door opened, and Elena stood in the doorway with the yoke in her hand and the gather on the end of it glowing like a small sun, and she looked at Petra, and Petra looked at her, and neither of them spoke for a long time.
Then Elena stepped back, and Petra stepped in, and the door closed behind her, and the bell over the frame gave its single clear note, and the note hung in the studio like a question that had at last been answered, or like the beginning of a question that would take some time to finish, and the gather on the rod turned once in the light and then again, and the light through the window fell across the floor in a long pale stripe, and somewhere in the house above them a clock ticked, and the morning went on.