Chapter 8 Broken Glass

The piece broke on a grey afternoon, and it took Isabella's whole heart with it. She had been working on it for days—a vase, the first thing she had tried to make on her own, without Marco's hands over hers. She had gathered and blown and shaped, and it had risen out of the fire with a grace that surprised her, curving the way she had seen it curve in her mind a hundred times. Marco had stood back and let her work, and Beppe had come to watch, and the whole workshop had gathered around the moment the way men gather around a birth. It broke in the cooling. The sound was small—a crack, a sigh, a whisper—and then the vase was in pieces on the stone floor, a harvest of pale glass, and Isabella was standing in the middle of it and the world had gone very quiet. She did not cry. That was the strange part. She stood there with her hands at her sides and her breath coming shallow, and she felt something go out of her that she had not known she was holding, and the workshop's silence was a pressure against her ears. "It was a cold spot in the gather," Marco said quietly. "You can't see it when it's hot. It only shows itself when the glass has cooled enough to be honest." "I know what happened," she said. "I just don't know why it matters so much." "Because it was yours." "No. Because it was the first thing I've made in years that I actually wanted." She knelt and picked up a piece of the vase, and it was cool now, dull with the dust of its own shattering. "In New York I made things to be looked at. I made them for the critics, for the gallery, for Daniel. I made them the way you make a bed for a guest—carefully, and with no part of myself in it." She turned the shard in her hand. "This is the first thing I've made that I would have kept." "Then it's not a loss," Marco said. "It's a lesson. The glass remembers what it costs to be made. So do you. Now you know." She was not comforted. But she put the shard in her pocket, and she helped him sweep the rest into the bucket, and she stood at the furnace for a long time without gathering, letting the heat work on her, thinking about the cold spot in the glass that had not shown itself until it was too late. It was Beppe who broke the silence. He had come in from the yard, and he stood in the doorway with his face gone gray, and he said, "Marco. The window." The workshop window, the big one that faced the canal, was broken. The glass lay in the yard in a fan of bright fragments, and someone had thrown a brick through it—a clean, deliberate act, aimed at the furnace. There was no note. There was nothing to say who had done it or why. But the brick lay in the middle of the floor where it had landed, and the shards of the window sparkled in the afternoon light like the pieces of the vase, and Isabella stood in the wreckage of the afternoon and felt the air change. Marco did not touch the brick. He stood looking at it for a long time, and his face had gone to stone. "They're back," he said. "Who?" "The consortium." He said the word like a taste he wanted to spit out. "Men who want this place. They came to your grandfather for years, trying to buy the furnace and the land and the name. He refused them every time, and they went away, and we thought—we hoped—that when he died it would be over." "And instead you inherited me." "And instead I inherited you." He looked at her, and something in his face broke open and closed again. "They know you're here now, Isabella. That's what this is. It's a message. It's them saying we know the Moretti is back, and we are watching." Beppe had gone to the yard and come back with a broom, and he swept the glass without being asked, and the rhythm of the broom was the rhythm of a man who had done this before. "This is how they worked before your grandfather," he said, not looking up. "Threats, then more threats, then a fire that looks like an accident. Emilio survived two of those fires. He was lucky. We may not be." Isabella looked at the brick, and then at the broken window, and then at the furnace, still burning, still patient, still waiting for her to come back to it. She thought about the show in March, about the loft in New York, about the safe and easy life she had been offered and had not yet refused. And she understood, with a clarity that was cold and clean, that the choice she had been putting off was not about her career at all. It was about whether she would let fear decide for her. "Call the police," she said. "I'll make the statement. And tomorrow we fix the window." "Tomorrow we fix the window," Marco repeated. "And the day after?" "The day after we keep working." She knelt and picked up the shard of her vase, and she looked at it for a long moment, and then she put it in her pocket beside the first one, two small pieces of everything she had broken and everything she had chosen. "We keep working, and we see what else the glass is trying to tell us." The furnace burned on through the night, and Isabella stayed late, gathering and shaping by the light of the fire, and the pieces she made that night were clumsy and imperfect, and she loved every one of them, because they were made after the window broke, and they proved she had not run. ---