against the back wall with its peanut gallery of drying busts, all looking at her. One, a self-portrait, her long hair pulled back into a loose bun at the nape of the neck, was almost dry enough to make its trip to the kiln. The others had all been hollowed out, but weren’t nearly dry enough yet. Three were commissions of rather stodgy businessmen like the one she planned to work on today, the sort of portrait work that helped pay the bills. The last few were of friends—hopefully to be part of a show if she could ever get the money together to have them cast.
Returning to the modeling stand, she spread out her reference material and gave the bust a spray of water from a plastic plant mister. Then she began to work on the detailing, constantly referring to her sketches and photographs as she shaped the clay with her fingers and modeling tools.
When her doorbell rang, she sat up, startled to realize that three hours had simply slipped away unnoticed while she’d been working. She rolled her shoulder muscles and stretched her hands over her head before standing up. It didn’t help much. Her back and shoulder muscles still felt far too tight. The doorbell rang again. Giving the bust another spray of water, she draped the damp cloth back over it. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she crossed the loft, adding new streaks of wet clay to the build-up of dried clay already there, stiffening the denim.
Opening the door, she found her friend Donal Greer standing in the hallway, the shoulders of his wool pea jacket white with snow. He was a little shorter than her five-ten—the discrepancy evened out by the heels of his boots—and a few years older. At the moment, the snow on his full beard and long dark ponytail made him seem gray-haired and far older. As the snow melted, it dripped to the floor where his boots had already started a pair of puddles. He gave her such a mournful, woe-bedraggled look that she wanted to laugh.
“It’s snowing,” Donal told her The pronouncement was uttered in an Eeyore-like voice made stranger by the slightest burr of an Irish accent.
Most people didn’t see through the moroseness he liked to affect. Ellie wasn’t one of them, though it had taken her a while to catch on. They’d met at one of Jilly Coppercorn’s parties, each of them having known Jilly for ages on their own, but never quite connecting with each other until that night. They’d talked straight through the party, all the way through the night until the dawn found them in the Dear Mouse Diner, still talking. From there it seemed inevitable that they’d become a couple, and they had for a while—even living together for a few months—but eventually they realized that they were much better suited as friends.
Donal gave a heavy sigh. “Truly snowing,” he went on. “Great bloody mounds of the stuff are being dumped from the sky.”
She smiled. “So I see. Come on in.”
“I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Donal added as he stepped inside. He looked over to the studio area. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”
“I needed to come up for air,” Ellie said. “How’d you know I needed a break?”
Donal shrugged and toed off his boots, one by one. They immediately began to work at forming a new puddle around themselves.
“You know me,” he said. “I know all and see all, like the wild-eyed Gaelic fortune-teller that I am. It’s bloody depressing, I tell you. Takes all the mystery out of life.”
Ellie rolled her shoulder muscles again. “I’d much prefer it if you’d suddenly decide to become a masseur,” she told him. “One who desperately needs someone to practice on.”
“It’ll never happen,” he said, passing over a paper bag with grease stains on the bottom. “Mostly because it’d take far more energy than I could ever muster.” He shed his pea jacket and dropped it against the wall by the door. “Instead, I’ve got these chocolate croissants and I was hoping to find