Chapter 8: The Toe

I asked Ansel for his phone at breakfast, once, with my mouth full of toast.

He didn't ask why.

He slid it across the table with the screen unlocked and said, "Read whatever you want. You'll anyway."

"I'm not going to read your private messages."

"You're thinking about the messages from Melody's number."

"I'm thinking about the messages from Melody's number," I admitted.

"Then read those."

I scrolled back through six months of them.

They were all short, and all after midnight.

I fell.

Please come.

Dont tell B im hurt.

Under each one, Ansel had answered: Coming.

I took a photo of every message, with the date and the time.

Melody's studio was in a brick building behind the rail yard.

It had a green door and a kiln in a shed out back.

She let me in at ten, wearing an apron stiff with dried clay.

"You came," she said.

"I asked you once."

"You did. You texted, are you missing."

"That was a rhetorical question."

"It was the nicest thing anyone's said to me this month."

The studio smelled like wet earth.

There were mugs on every shelf, in blue and green and speckled white.

A wheel stood in the middle of the room with a half-made bowl on it.

"Sit," Melody said, and gave me a stool and a mug of tea that had a thumbprint in the glaze.

I put Ansel's phone on the worktable between us.

"These are from your number," I said. "Starting in March."

She read the first four.

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