I weld a new cross-brace between two lower ribs and watch the bead form—clean, even, the color telling me the heat is right. I run my finger along it and feel the smoothness through my glove.Yes.That's it. That's exactly it.
I'm grinning behind the welder's mask. Nobody can see it, which is fine. Some happiness is just for you.
By noon, I've made real progress. The upper ribs are nearly complete, curving inward with a delicacy that keeps surprising me. I didn't plan for them to be this graceful—I was thinking of something more brutal, more angular. But themetal wanted to be gentle, and I've learned to listen when that happens.
I strip off the gloves and stretch. My shoulders ache in that deep, satisfying way that means I've been working well, not just working hard. I fill the kettle and call Nish while I wait for it to boil.
"Question," he says instead of hello. "How many pieces are you bringing?"
"One. The big one."
"Can you do two? Even something smaller? I've got pedestal space if you have anything that works at that scale."
I think about the pieces on the back shelf—half-finished experiments, abandoned starts. Most of them aren't ready. But there's one I made last winter during a week when I couldn't sleep. A small thing, iron and wire. A hand reaching upward out of broken ground. I wasn't sure about it then. It felt too personal, too exposed. Like something I should have kept hidden.
But maybe that's exactly why it should be in the show.
"Maybe," I tell him. "Let me look."
"That's a yes."
"That's a maybe, Nish."
"I have known you for two years. Your maybes are always yeses. You just need time to catch up to yourself."
I laugh. He's not wrong.
After we hang up, I dig the hand sculpture off the back shelf. It's dusty, and the wire at the base is tangled in a way that needs cleaning up. But when I set it on the workbench and look at it properly, I feel something. The fingers aren't elegant—they're thick, a little clumsy, reaching with effort rather thangrace. It's not a beautiful hand. It's a desperate one. And there's something true about that desperation that makes my breath catch.
I set it aside carefully. I'll work on it tonight.
Around noon, Cal shows up. He lets himself in through the side door with his master key, the way he always does—a courtesy knock followed immediately by entry, which isn't really a courtesy at all, but Cal has his own logic about these things and I stopped arguing years ago.
He's carrying a bag of bagels, which he sets on the workbench without comment. This is how Cal shows affection—food, delivered silently, with no expectation of thanks. He did the same thing when I had the flu last winter, appearing with soup and disappearing before I could say anything. For a man who communicates primarily in grunts and shrugs, he pays remarkable attention.
"Heard back about the latch," he says, leaning against the doorframe.
I look up. "And?"
"Building owner didn't send anyone. Says he hasn't authorised maintenance here in over a year."
"So who fixed it?"
He shrugs. "Couldn't tell you. Maybe someone from the city? They do those safety walkthrough things sometimes."
"Since when does the city fix anything voluntarily?"
"Fair point." He scratches the back of his neck. "Look, kid—I don't know who did it. But it's a good latch. Better than the one that was there. You want me to pull it off?"
"No. It works."
"Then I wouldn't worry about it."
He raps his knuckles on the doorframe—his goodbye—and leaves the bagels. I eat one with cream cheese that I find in the back of the mini fridge, past its sell-by date but still fine, and think about what he said.
The building owner didn't send anyone. Cal didn't do it. No city inspection, because the city doesn't fix things in buildings like this. The other bays on this side are empty.
Someone came to my studio door, specifically, and replaced the hardware. Someone who noticed it was broken and decided to fix it.
