Reconstruction #9

Morning fills the warehouse studio much like clay packs beneath fingernails. Skylights allow in a cold, steady light that rests on unfinished heads. Zora moves through them with the calm precision of a carpenter, wire clippers held in her palm, her black smock marked with gray. Each frame stands upright on a metal spine, vertebrae fused the previous day. She adjusts the alignment, shifts a jaw, angles a cheekbone slightly to the left. The faces around her show no sign of life, but she handles each part as if breath already stirs beneath the surface. She listens to the tension of plaster pressed to steel, to the faint creak of a collarbone when she adds weight. A radio murmurs from the loft above the office.

She turns last to the ninth frame. Its neck angles slightly higher than the others, as if it is trying to glimpse the rafters where pigeons once nested before she sealed the openings. The posture pleases her. She wedges a piece of cedar behind the cervical joint to hold the line steady, then steps back. A bead of sweat runs down from her temple. She wipes it away with her glove’s cuff, then places her thumb at the center of the brow, leaving a mark where life will begin. When she steps away, that single print becomes the only human mark in the room.

Across the river the elevators at the newsroom open with a rattle. Fluorescent lights outline each cubicle in the same bland white. A former employee stands by the editor’s glass-walled office, arms crossed over a gray coat with a worn collar. Reed Harlan gestures for him to enter, still holding the phone to his ear. The man gives a quick nod, sits down, and sets a manila envelope on the desk. He taps its edge while Reed wraps up the call.

Reed ends the call. “Always good to see someone who got out clean,” he says, giving a brief smile that asks for nothing. He taps the envelope. “This the sculptor?”

The man nods. “She works out of a studio in the South Warehouse District. Rebuilds faces without any remains. No reference material. Says they come to her in pieces. People are starting to notice.”

It felt unlikely. Maybe invasive. He questioned what kind of truth might rise without being summoned.

“Victims who never existed,” Reed says as he opens the envelope.

“That’s one way to look at it.”

Reed flips through the press sheet. A few photos clipped at the edges. A short biography pulled from a gallery flyer. No statement from the artist, only dates and materials. “This doesn’t really fit with crime. Maybe arts. Possibly Sunday.”

The man leans forward. “Give it to Thomas. He can walk both sides. He won’t just polish the myth.”

Reed shuts the folder. “He won’t cover it gently.”

“Good. She’s not soft work.”

The man zips his coat. Reed watches him go, then carries the envelope across the bullpen.

Thomas D’Mello sits before two monitors, headline drafts open but untouched. He runs a fingertip along the frame of a family photo, unaware of Reed behind him until a throat clears.

“Field trip,” Reed says. “Warehouse District. Sculptor’s name’s Zora. She builds faces from nothing. Take a photographer if you want. I want something real by Monday.”

Thomas lifts the sheet and looks at the image. A stark photograph. The sculptor stands behind a half-formed face, one hand on a chisel, the other lost in shadow. The expression gives nothing away, but her eyes meet the camera with unsettling clarity. Her gaze lands somewhere just past the lens, as if she already knows what he will ask. There is no clear resemblance to anyone he knows, not yet. But something in the shape of the brow feels wrong in a precise way, like a truth cut too close to mask a lie.

A throb builds at the base of his skull and settles behind his jaw. He blames the coffee, though the cup still sits untouched beside the keyboard.

“I’ll go after lunch,” Thomas says.

Reed keeps walking. “Go now. Art keeps its own hours.”

Thomas pulls on his coat and slides the notebook into his inner pocket, fingers brushing the soft edge of the envelope. Outside, the street holds the grit of early spring. Melted snow pools near curb cuts. Salt crystals collect in the cracks between concrete seams. He walks to the station without rushing, each block stitching to the next. The photograph stays folded at his side, but the face inside it has already taken hold behind his eyes.

On the train, Thomas opens the press copy again, smoothing the creases along his thigh. The name beneath the image gives no invitation, only a label that sits flat on the page. Reconstruction #9. Nothing more. No title to round the edges, no caption to explain. The image seems to lean forward with a quiet pull, as if the face is not posing but waiting. Wide-set eyes hold their stillness. A cleft runs down the chin like an unfinished seam. The mouth stays closed, but not sealed. It might be holding breath. Or memory. Or both. He stares until the paper feels warmer than his hand.

He opens his notebook and places the pen to the page, letting a line rise through him. Who dreams the dead before they are born. The train bends into a curve. Ink wavers, then spills in a small arc, like a breath caught mid-sentence. He caps the pen and shuts the book. His reflection flickers in the window between bursts of light. His eyes shift with each pulse. Then the river claims the brightness, and only the glass remains.

The station empties him into a corridor lined with brick warehouses and idle scaffolding. No one else walks the path. Tags peel from the lower walls where rain has lifted paint from cement. Two gulls drift above in unsettled air. The address brings him to a converted textile plant, one bay door rolled halfway up. A warped sign leans beside it, letters fading. Visitors by appointment.

He steps through and says her name. The sound echoes once, then vanishes.

Hollyn appears from a stairwell, clipboard drawn close to her chest. Her eyes flick from his face to his coat, then settle on his mouth. “You’re early.”

“Thomas D’Mello. Times-Tribune.” He offers a card. She doesn’t take it.

“Zora’s pouring. She’ll come down soon. No flash. Don’t touch the work. No comments about who the faces remind you of. People always think they see someone familiar.”

He nods and steps farther inside. The air is cooler than the street, sharper against his coat’s lining. The smell builds slowly, not abrupt but surrounding. Wet clay, iron, something sour underneath. Sculptures line the tables in gradual stages, arranged as if the room remembers how each face formed. Wire frames tilt upward with hollow gazes. The unfinished heads carry the weight of something becoming human. One holds only a single cheek. Another seems nearly whole, lips just open enough to suggest breath. He moves between them carefully, not touching an elbow, not brushing a jaw. They seem to register his presence in a way most people don’t.

At the far wall, a tarp drapes over one figure. A handwritten tag hangs from the plinth. #9.

Hollyn follows his glance. “That one stays covered until opening.”

“Why?”

She lifts a shoulder without interest. “Ask her.”

Footsteps descend the ladder behind them.

Zora reaches the floor with quiet effort, each step pared down to function. She pulls off her gloves, flexes her fingers once, and meets his eyes. Her face stays composed. He can’t read welcome or resistance but the steadiness of someone taking stock.

“I’m Zora,” she says. “Tell me what kind of story you’re writing.”

Thomas tries to reply, but words falter. He says nothing of themes or angles. He watches the clay still clinging to her hands. He imagines fingers pressing into soft matter, leaving a trace only revealed when the light shifts.

She leads him up the stairs. The upper room narrows under the sloped roof. Daylight spills through a strip of glass high on the wall. No view, just sky. Tools sit in clean rows along a drafting table. Shelves hold molds, sketches, and raw material.

She sits and waits.

She gestures to a stool. Thomas takes it. He pulls out his notebook and pen but does not open either. Her hands return to the clay. She slices through a block the size of a child’s torso with wire, cutting clean planes until the surface lies even.

“What do you want to know,” she asks without looking up.

He pauses, then says, “Tell me about your process.”

“The skull comes first,” she says. “No reference. I start with balance and proportion. The angle of a temple. Distance between points of pressure. I follow instinct. When the structure feels stable, I add tissue. Mark muscle. Shape the skin.”

Thomas watches the tool move again through the clay.

She goes on. “I keep the flaws. A slight unevenness in the lips. A scar if it fits. Every face has a disruption. Clean never feels real.”

He tilts his head. “But the face is imagined.”

“Entirely.”

“Why use forensic techniques?”

She keeps slicing the clay. “Because portraiture tries to preserve. Forensics rebuilds. It starts where something ends.”

He scribbles a note and looks up. “So the suggestion of harm is part of it.”

This time she stops, the wire drooping in her hands as her eyes hold his without softening. “If that’s how you see it.”

“You called it ‘reconstruction.’”

He told himself this was only about the sculptor. But he kept circling back to last month. The way Jessica looked when she said goodbye.

“That’s how I trained,” she says. “I sat in courtrooms. Sketched while experts testified. I watched how each witness shaped the same story into a different face. Memory folds into feeling. No one remembers the same way.”

Thomas sets the pen against his jaw. “Tell me about the ninth one.”

She drops the wire on the table.

“It’s not ready.”

“Not ready how.”

“It won’t be shown until the opening.”

“You’ve shown the rest.”

“That one stays covered.”

“Can I see it?”

She does not blink. “No.”

He lets the silence stretch. He could leave, but something in him keeps leaning in. He flips to a new page. “Do you title them?”

“Just numbers.”

“Why not names?”

“I don’t name ghosts. Names make them yours.”

The sentence lands like something he’s heard before, long ago and unspoken, settling in his chest as he writes nothing, only thanks her while she’s already turned back to the clay, her hands moving in the same steady rhythm as if nothing had been said at all.

At the foot of the stairs, Hollyn leans against a column. “She can smell sentiment,” she says. “Best to leave it outside.”

The train rises toward the surface, pulling daylight into the windows in pale strips. Thomas doesn’t reach for his notebook. He leans his head against the glass and watches the city rebuild itself. Steel scaffolds rising from fractured lots, warehouse walls catching the light but offering nothing back. He tells himself he’s only watching. That her face isn’t there. That it never was. Still, something lingers on the glass. It follows him home.

He walks the long way through quiet streets, under a sky holding a thinner kind of light. The apartment feels untouched, every paper in its place. He docks the recorder and presses play. Zora’s voice moves through the room in a steady rhythm. He listens once. Then again, searching the pauses between her words. He thinks of Jessica with a bar of soap and a plastic knife, carving his face with quiet care. She said it was for class, but the details were wrong in intentional ways, as if she was trying to fix him before he could ask her to. When it melted in the heat, he left the drawer open for days. She never brought it up again. Neither did he.

He plays the recording again. This time he closes his eyes.

Reed reads the draft like someone holding back what he wants to say. A pencil taps once in the margin. Then again. Thomas stands across from him, hands in his pockets.

“You’re editorializing,” Reed says. “She’s either a sculptor or a mystic. Right now she’s both. Choose one. I don’t want metaphors. I need facts. I need process. This line—‘the skin remembers what the mind forgets’—what do I do with that?”

Thomas says nothing. He picks up his bag and walks out.

In the stairwell, he texts Clarie.

Can we meet soon. I need to ask you something about Jess.

He looks at the message. Fixes the punctuation. Sends it without rereading. The reply doesn’t come right away.

Twenty minutes pass. Then her name lights the screen.

If it’s about the sculpture, I don’t want to talk about it.

That’s what she wrote, “If it’s about the sculpture, I don’t want to talk about it.”

He reads it twice, then replies.

It’s not. It’s about that last month.

They meet in a tea shop that smells faintly of chamomile. Clarie wears a denim jacket with the collar up and keeps her keys looped around two fingers. Her smile never quite forms.

“I still think about her,” she says, before he can speak. “I still dream about how she stood when she was lying.”

Thomas waits. She lifts her cup slowly. Her hands are dry. Ink smudges the side of her thumb.

“I thought I missed something,” she says. “But Jess told me she was scared to go home. You were her brother, but you weren’t only that anymore. She said you were always watching. That you needed to know everything.”

“She told me once she didn’t know when close stopped feeling safe.”

His voice tightens. “She said that?”

Clarie does not blink. “She said you were the reason she didn’t apply to the Iowa program. That you’d make it into something. That it wouldn’t stay hers.”

He draws a slow breath. “We were close. But not, you know.”

“I’m not accusing you.” Her voice cuts in. “I’m saying I didn’t understand what close meant to her. Or to you.”

He thanks her because there’s nothing else to say. She doesn’t get up when he leaves. Her cup is empty. Her hands rest in her lap like she’s holding the absence of something neither of them could name.

Outside, the wind gathers strength. His scarf catches in the buttons of his coat. Deep in his chest, something loosens.

In the studio, Zora stands alone in the tall room. The tarp over the sculpture lifts and falls with each breath of air from the ceiling vent. She watches it settle, then shift again. She doesn’t touch it.

Hollyn’s voice rises from the floor below. “You leaving it like that?”

Zora doesn’t look down. “No. It isn’t finished.”

“You’ve said that for a week.”

Zora steps back, her hand hovering just above the fabric.

“I think I made the mouth too familiar.”

The silence that follows doesn’t agree or object. It holds the stillness of something about to begin, the kind of pause where shape waits for its name.

Thomas wakes before dawn, his jaw clenched, one hand twisted in the sheets. The imprint of his knuckles lingers after he gets up. He showers and dresses in the same practiced order as always. He pours coffee at the table, but doesn’t drink it.

The photographs spread across his desk are too clean. Promotional images from Zora’s gallery, each face lit without emotion. He arranges them in sequence. One has an ear set slightly too low. Another shows a jaw that won’t close evenly. By the sixth, the faces begin to settle. By the eighth, breath seems possible. The ninth remains unseen.

He studies the last photo. The tarp clings to the form beneath it, only a shoulder left exposed. His mind fills in what the frame conceals. His fingers tremble before they touch the image.

At the warehouse, the scent of plaster is sharper than before. Zora stands alone, sleeves rolled to the elbow, shaping the bridge of a nose with two fingers and a slim tool. Wet clay streaks her apron. She doesn’t turn when she hears him.

“You said the forms were imagined,” he says. “But they’ve changed. They’re more exact.”

Zora glances back. “That’s practice.”

“They look like people you might pass on the street.”

“They are people. They live in the minds of those who see them. That’s always been the point.”

He steps closer. “What about the ninth?”

Her hand freezes. The tool hovers. Then she resumes her work.

“I dreamed her again,” she says.

“You’ve seen her before?”

“More than once.”

He waits. “What happens?”

Zora wipes her palms and turns toward him. “She walks through a glass door. Her hair is wet. She looks at me like she expects something. Then I wake.”

“She never speaks?”

“No.”

He looks at her, not at the sculpture or the dream but at Zora herself, steady and unshaped by anything he can name. Her face holds no clear emotion. He hasn’t spoken of Jessica, but something in Zora’s dream edged too near, as if memory had slipped into the room wearing someone else’s hands.

He nods once and leaves, the quiet of the studio trailing behind him.

At the archives, cold creeps through the seams of his coat. Fluorescent lights flicker in a rhythm that stings his eyes. He walks to the counter and asks for the coroner’s report. The woman at the desk brings out the file without a word. Jessica’s name is written in blue marker on the cardboard sleeve.

He reads it under the mechanical flutter of the microfilm reader, the details arriving without pause or sorrow. Date. Time. Cause. Ligature marks where the skin gave in. Hemorrhaging behind the eyes. Blood alcohol level past the point of clarity. The ruling says suicide. A neighbor found her after the landlord called in for a welfare check. The story falls into place with too much order and not enough life.

He asks for the police photographs next. The envelope's thick, sealed like it means something. He waits till he's back at his desk to open it. The prints are on matte paper, but he still sees what he came for. A shoulder slipping under a loose collar. A jaw turned just enough to feel familiar.

The image doesn't match the memory. He tries to reach back to the last time he saw her face, but even that’s starting to come apart. What's left carries the weight of clay. Her features fade into the shape Zora made, and he can't tell anymore which came first. He thinks about calling Ruth, but the urge slips away before he moves.

He closes the folder and stares at the grain in the desk, waiting for the pulse in his temples to ease.

On the gallery floor, Zora kneels over painter’s tape, measuring spacing with the precision of someone used to doubt. Hollyn stands on the ladder, adjusting a lighting rig.

“How many press requests?” she calls down.

“Ten confirmed,” Zora says.

“You want me to keep D’Mello off the floor until the crowd clears?”

There is a pause. Zora walks to the sculpture labeled with the ninth number and places her palm against the drape, not to move it, just to feel the shape beneath the cloth.

“Did he say anything strange last time?”

Hollyn lowers the wrench. “Only that the faces are getting more precise.”

Zora gives a small nod and turns away, but the thought lingers. Neither of them says what both suspect. That the detail is not from skill. That the face no longer waits in dreams but uses hers to arrive.

That night, Thomas dreams of Jessica. She stands in the hallway outside the room where they spent much of their childhood. Her coat is fastened to the neck. Her hair drips onto the floor, leaving dark spots behind her. In one hand she holds a sculptor’s wire. In the other, a length of red rope.

She does not speak. She watches him.

He wakes with his ribs too tight to stretch and the taste of metal in his mouth.

Two days before the gallery opens, Thomas returns to the warehouse without calling ahead. Hollyn meets him at the door.

“She’s working,” she says.

“I won’t interrupt.”

“You can’t see number nine.”

“I didn’t ask to.”

Zora’s voice drifts from above. “Let him up.”

He climbs the stairs. Zora stands behind the table, shaping a face he doesn’t recognize. A man, maybe. The jaw is broader, the cheekbones too flat to be hers. She does not look up. The clay bends beneath her fingers.

“What happened to the one from the dream?” he asks.

“It’s on the floor,” she says. “Under the tarp.”

“And this one?” He watches the new face.

“I don’t know yet,” she says.

“Do you usually work on two at once?”

“No,” she answers. “But sometimes the first answer feels too sure. And I don’t trust that.”

Thomas watches her shape the brow ridge. The clay begins to gather weight, the suggestion of memory pressing beneath the eye.

“You think it’s yours?” she asks.

He lifts his head. “What?”

“The dream face,” she says. “You think it belongs to someone you lost.”

His throat tightens. When he swallows, it takes effort.

“I think it might,” he says quietly.

Zora doesn’t meet his eyes. Her hand stays steady. “That’s how people make ghosts,” she says. “They feed them memory until they take shape.”

Thomas closes the notebook without writing.

Downstairs, Hollyn adjusts the lighting. Zora’s hand rests on the jaw of the unfinished sculpture, but her attention has already drifted. She watches the shadow his body leaves as he walks away.

Opening night carries the scent of solvent beneath a trace of citrus. Light cuts the room into clean shapes, highlighting the sculptures while the edges fall into quiet.

Zora walks the gallery twice before the doors open. She checks distances between pedestals, adjusts angles, shifts shadows. The figures hold their balance in the hush before speech, each one caught in the pause before a voice decides what to say.

Hollyn follows behind her at a measured pace, clipboard against her side.

The tarp on number nine stays in place.

“Wait until we’re past the hour,” Zora says. “Then uncover it.”

Hollyn nods. “Are you going to say anything?”

Zora brushes her thumb along a jawline. “No.”

Outside, Thomas stands with a hand on the railing. His coat is too heavy for the weather, but he keeps it on. He watches the guests arrive, most dressed in the understated certainty of critics.

He steps in after the first wave. Near the second piece, one of the early ones, he stops. Its small flaws hold him, not because they are mistakes, but because they resist memory. He wonders if the path back from grief begins in the places where memory fails.

Zora enters. She wears slate gray, not black. Her dress bears faint traces of dried paint at the hem. Hollyn remains near the wall. The room feels like a canvas half-cleaned with some parts raw, some revealed.

Thomas moves through the space with purpose. A woman whispers, “They look like they’re just about to speak.” A man says, “You can hear the breath if you stand close enough.”

He stops before number nine, still covered.

“Soon,” Hollyn says at his side.

He doesn’t respond. The shape beneath the fabric already lives in his mind.

When Hollyn lifts the cloth, the gallery draws inward. Even the soft murmur fades. The room holds still. Number nine stands beneath the lights, dry and unfinished. The mouth rests in quiet, not quite shut. The brow leans forward as though it remembers something too late.

Beside him, someone draws a sharp breath, the kind people take when they see themselves and recoil.

He had wanted to see her again, but not like this. Not as she really was. As she had been when she still belonged to him.

The sculpture doesn’t mirror her. Its mouth belongs to dreams. Its jaw took shape during hours spent watching another face form from clay. Recognition didn’t come from memory. His belief shaped the resemblance more than any truth ever could.

Light slips across the cheek. Everything slips out of place. Jessica was never inside this figure. He put her there. Guilt guided his hands more than loss ever did.

Heat swells around him. The sound of the gallery fades under the pressure of what becomes clear.

The memory doesn’t return with force. It opens like a drawer that hasn’t moved in years. The scene appears whole.

She stood in the kitchen with her coat still wet and her hair plastered to her cheeks, saying she had to go, saying the word boundary like it was the last thing she had left to offer, saying it wasn’t love anymore.

Her keys were already in her hand and he stood between her and the door as she told him she couldn’t carry his silence any longer, said she saw how deep he had buried himself in her choices, while he breathed too hard and spoke too fast, insisting she owed him, that echoes don’t vanish, and when she stepped to the side and he reached toward her shoulder, the movement was small but her foot slipped on the tile, her temple struck the counter, and the sound that followed was something new to him, something that made the rest of the room go still.

He lifted her hand and placed it gently at her side. He ran water over the sponge. The cloth moved across the counter. He hung her coat back on the hook.

When the doorbell rang, he stood beside her without explanation, watching as they took in the room.

They asked questions that did not need answers. The story formed on its own. He remained silent while they shaped it.

Now the air outside is sharper than expected. His coat feels heavier. He steps into the night.

Inside, Zora stands under the lights, eyes fixed on the line of the sculpture’s jaw. Hollyn brings her a list of press names. Zora does not take it. Her hand rests on the edge of the plinth. The form has shifted again. What once felt imagined now feels anchored. The vision is gone. Only what her hands have made remains.

In the newsroom, Reed opens the message. On Making Faces from Nothing.

The article moves without scene or source. It breathes with restraint. A study in grief that never confesses. Memory turned into structure. A figure shaped by instinct and strain, meaning held in form alone.

Reed reads the final line, then leans back. He closes his eyes for one full breath. Then he clicks send.

By the end of the week, the desk sits empty. The photo frame holds nothing. The rest stays still.

Zora begins the new sculpture the way a season changes. Not by decision, but through pressure. Her hands reach for the clay. She starts with the spine, curved in a way that suggests waiting.

Rain falls through the city in slow lines. Her coat darkens from collar to hem. Her boots gather water. At the bay door, Hollyn leans against the frame, arms crossed, clipboard dangling.

“He was across the street,” Hollyn says as Zora walks past.

“Who?”

“Thomas D’Mello. He stood there for a while, then walked away.”

Zora climbs the stairs without answering. She pulls the wet coat from her shoulders and hangs it beside a set of blueprints. Her hands ache. She flattens her palms against the table until her joints loosen. Then she picks up the chisel.

The new figure waits. Its shape is still emerging, but the shoulders have settled. The neck tilts forward, as if caught between prayer and a memory that has not arrived. She studies the weight in the base before lifting her smoothing tool.

Below, Hollyn moves through the space, switching on lights one by one. The room returns in pieces. Gold on the workbench. Gray across the plaster wall.

Thomas stands in a hallway, one hand pressed flat to the paint. His breath fogs the glass of a picture frame that no longer holds her face. Only cardboard remains, corners still marked with adhesive. He watches until his reflection breaks apart.

At his desk, he opens the file again. The title reads On Making Faces from Nothing. The words seem unfamiliar. He reads them aloud, but they do not hold. He cannot remember writing the final paragraph. Its rhythm feels complete, untouched.

He opens the folder labeled Audio Interviews. Zora’s voice plays, even and composed.

“Memory bends until it fits what the heart can survive.”

He plays it again. Then again. Her voice begins to echo beneath others. Jessica. Clarie. His own.

He lowers the volume and lies flat on the floor.

In the gallery, number nine draws attention. Visitors linger longer by its plinth. Their faces shift. Most say nothing. A man in a fitted coat sketches quietly until his wife checks the time and touches his sleeve. A child presses a finger into the base before being led away. The mark remains.

More than one guest murmurs, “She looks like she understands something.”

Thomas walks beside the river. Mud and runoff darken the path. His coat clings at the cuffs. Rain slips through the underpass in long lines. Layers of graffiti stretch across the wall. One blue hand reaches outward.

His memory begins again.

Her shoulder turning. The edge of the counter. Her hair still wet. The keys already in her hand.

There had been no cry. Only breath caught in the chest, suspended and unfinished.

He had wiped the surfaces. Folded the jacket she had dropped. Returned her books to the shelf. When the medics knocked, he opened the door with steady hands and a clear voice. He told the version that matched what they were already prepared to believe. He repeated it until they knew it more clearly than he did. Ruth took it to her parish. Anthony included it in trimmed messages to relatives. Thomas carried it until the truth settled into silence.

Everything shifted when Zora removed the cloth.

He walks home soaked to the bone. Each step draws the truth higher through his body until it fills his lungs, hums in his legs, and pulses through his hands.

Zora watches the rain move across the mezzanine window. Hollyn has gone for the night. The studio hums with the sound of clay shifting on wood and the low rhythm of the heater.

She kneels beside the new sculpture. Her palm smooths the edge of the jaw.

Thomas no longer fills her thoughts. What lingers is the shape of a face arriving uninvited, a life pressing forward before it has taken its first breath.

The dream has left her. The girl with wet hair and a closed mouth has not come back.

Zora lowers her hand. She exhales and closes her eyes.

Thomas dreams of the sculpture. In the dream, it is Jessica at twenty, barefoot on the gallery pedestal, head tilted slightly, wearing the coat she was buried in and holding nothing. She steps down. When he reaches for her, she opens her mouth, but no sound comes.

He wakes with the taste of blood at the back of his throat. His jaw is locked tight, the muscle aching.

He stays home from work.

Reed leaves a message, brief and even.

“Thomas. I ran the piece. It’s making rounds. The board wants more. I need to know if you’re coming back.”

Thomas does not return the call.

He opens a blank document, types four words, then deletes them. The screen returns to white.

At the window, he watches a cat leap between fire escapes, clean and sure. The motion means nothing. The world continues without memory, without refusal.

Zora sketches for the first time in months, but the lines don’t hold. Her hand moves through curves without structure. After ten minutes of unresolved marks, she tears the page and starts again.

Clay holds what paper lets go.

She closes the book, walks to the studio floor, and stands before the unfinished sculpture. One eye has taken shape. The other remains bare. She presses her thumb to the center of the brow and leaves the mark. She doesn’t clean her hand.

Thomas returns to the gallery once more. The sky hangs without color. The sidewalk is washed clean by rain. Inside, the lights are dimmer. Shadows stretch farther across the floor. The air feels colder than it did on opening night. He keeps his coat on.

The docent is gone. He walks past the earlier pieces without stopping. Number two is cracking near the base of the ear. He follows the fracture with his eyes but doesn’t reach out.

He stands in front of number nine. There is no one else there. No camera captures his shape. The sculpture is held in soft light. Dust has begun to settle in the grooves.

He does not blink.

The resemblance is gone.

The eyes are shaped differently. The mouth rests in stillness. The brow carries no plea. What once seemed like Jessica, what once demanded belief, no longer does.

The illusion has lifted.

He had shaped the connection himself. Drawn her out of memory and guilt and grief. It was his own mind that gave the face her name.

The figure before him belongs to someone else.

A stranger, seen with perfect clarity.

He turns and leaves. His steps are quiet. His breath is even. At the corner, he rests one hand on the crosswalk pole. The signal changes, but he does not move.

He has chosen no direction. He will not write again. He will not confess.

No one else knows.

Jessica’s death remains a suicide. The file stays closed. The version is accepted.

What endures is memory held clean, intact and unsaid.

He carries it. He carries it alone.

Zora finishes cleaning after dusk. Hollyn is gone. The kiln is off. The windows are locked. The gallery stands still.

Upstairs, Zora stands before a new armature. It is taller than the others. The shoulders broad. No clear form yet. She has not decided who it will become. The structure remains unnamed.

She lays a coil of clay beside it and exhales.

The dream girl has not returned.

Zora rests her palm against the table.

She begins again.

At the paper, Reed packs Thomas’s desk. It has sat untouched for weeks. A mug leaves a ring. A pen rests beside a torn page. The page holds no words. Just a smudge of ink where a thumb pressed into the margin.

Reed places it in the box.

He does not throw it away.

The gallery closes for winter. Number nine is stored. As the lights shut off, the sculpture fades into shadow. The clay dries. A crack forms across the upper lip. Another beneath the eye.

Time begins to undo the shape.

By morning, Zora is working. This time she skips the sketch. Her hands move straight to clay.

The material resists, then yields.

She adds no features. Just the round of a cheek. The quiet weight of a lowered brow.

The figure holds no name yet.

But the posture listens.

And she keeps shaping it.