Page 36 of Against Ebony Irish Seas

Sophie wandered over to her stainless steel worktable. “Which is why I had a special marver table made. This is where I roll the glass while it’s attached to a blowpipe or punty rod.”

“Do you ever use molds?” Ellie asked.

Sophie shook her head. “Not anymore. Optic molds don’t have the sense of flow I want in my work. There’s something special about forming it with my own hands. As you know.”

Kathleen flexed her fingers. “Speaking of, I’m about set to heat some metal and pound it with these hands. No better way to spend the day if you ask me. Before we get out of your hair—meaning I’m dragging Ellie out with me—do you need help with anything?”

Camaraderie and support. Yeah, she was going to be happy here. “Bets already volunteered Liam, but thanks.”

“You’re in great hands there.” She snagged Ellie’s arm playfully. “All right, cutie, let’s leave this poor woman alone to get down to business.”

“If you need anything at all,” Ellie said, blinking her eyes playfully as her friend pretended to drag her out of the shed.

She waved and then took a moment to savor the silence. Her place. Her tools. She needed to make it all her own. Here she would make her mark with another mind-blowing installation. But first, she needed to hone her design. The pregnant goddess added extra challenges to both the composition and execution of the work.

But first she should start her furnace, and for that, she needed Liam to haul some batch for her. When Linc had asked if she’d need an assistant, she’d told him she wanted to wait and see. She knew they were short on lodging space, and while she’d used one on and off, she liked working alone. Call her a loner or an only child. But she was used to it. Having other people around all the time could be a distraction, and she wanted—needed—her focus and energy to be on creating.

She found Liam and three other workers in the children’s shed, hanging industrial lights on ladders. The pirate-looking man seemed to sense her because he looked over his shoulder, called out a greeting, and then jumped down from his perch with thesavoir faireof Errol Flynn in an old swashbuckler.

“Mum told me to be at the ready for whatever you need.” He crossed to her with the kind of smile that made her feel like they were already friends. His sandy blond hair was pulled back into a small ponytail, which added to his pirate look. “You settling in well? Couldn’t have been anything but a shock seeing your new home up and taken away.”

“Greta and I are really lucky Jamie offered his home to us. Looks like the shed for the kids is coming along nicely.”

“Not too bad. We’re on schedule. We need to build and paint a few temporary, moveable walls to make it more kid-friendly, but we should be in good shape. So, what can I help you with?”

She cringed. “Hauling bags of glass to dump into my furnace. Hope that’s okay.”

“It’s one of my favorite things to do,” he said, putting her at ease with his incredibly open smile. “I like helping people have what they want. At least that’s how I see being a handyman. It gives me a chance to see and understand people and bring their vision to fruition.”

Her artist instincts kicked up. “You’re an artist?”

He laughed. “Not like you’re thinking. I construct and paint things. Houses. Walls. Fences. Sheds. But I’ll admit I’ve been doing some murals lately. I’m practicing on some of the walls and floors at Summercrest Manor. With both tile and other mixed media. If it continues to develop, I might offer to do it for others.”

“I’d love to see that sometime,” she said as they started walking back to her shed, the ground still squishing under her feet from the recent heavy rain.

“You’ll have to get Jamie to bring you over.” He gave her a winning smile. “Happiest I’ve ever seen him.”

First, Ellie and Kathleen and now Liam. Yeah, she liked hearing how happy Jamie had been. She only smiled in response.

“Now,” he said after a pause, “where are these bags?”

After she fitted them both with safety goggles, a mask, and gloves, he lugged them like they weighed nothing. Fortunately, he’d worn work clothes, so she didn’t have to have him don a smock. Tiny glass particles could be dangerous. She supervised the loading and thanked him after the bin was full.

“Care to do the honors?” she asked, pointing to the controls. “I can walk you through it.”

He held up his hands. “No, I wouldn’t dream of it. I’ll let you get to it. We’re all glad you’re here, Sophie. You need anything else, let me know.”

Alone again, she longed for a bottle of champagne to break across the bow of her furnace, so to speak. “I hereby christen you the Glory Maker,” she said with a radiant smile. “We don’t want our glory hole to be all alone in the fun, do we?”

The furnace roared to life, and she set the temperatures and controls to her desired settings. Glass would soon start melting, as viscous as river water. The power of heat. God, how she loved it!

Satisfied, she dug out the design she’d been working on since receiving Linc’s first call in the spring. Her worktable was soon covered with drawings. To make the addition of the pregnant goddess inside of the tree trunk, she would need to widen the glass base of the sculpture. Her metal armature would also require further modification, and she would need to add more pieces to the limbs of the trees now that she was widening the trunk and tree. Making the pregnant goddess would be a challenge of assembling hand-blown shapes—cones, circles, spirals, spheres.

Right now, she was hoping to top out at a twelve-foot tree. Three years of work, she estimated, but she often finished early. She would see. The installation was going to be her most complex one yet. She was thinking she might be in the ballpark of about six hundred individual pieces of glass. Each would be fitted with a plastic tube for stability. From there, she would place it on the metal aperture and connect it securely with metal rods. Cables from the museum’s ceiling would hold it in place.

“How’s it going in here?” a Southern drawl sounded.

She set her pencil down with a smile and looked up as Linc and Bets entered the shed. “Hey! How’d the meeting go? Or should I ask?”

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