The week ended where it had begun.

  Gerald crouched near the main gate with his knees in the packed dirt and a piece of glass in his hand. The sun was behind the house and the ridge, low enough that the light came in at an angle he had not seen before -- long, reaching, finding colours in the wall that the morning light did not know were there. The browns turned to amber. The greens split into shades he did not have names for. A piece of glass so thick it looked black most of the day had opened into a deep red, almost the colour of the cherry preserves Mary put up in autumn.

  He had been here for some time.

  The fragment in his left hand was deep blue, about the size of his thumbnail. One edge was rough where it had broken from a larger piece, and the convex face carried a bubble flaw just beneath the surface that bent whatever light passed through it. He had found it three days ago in the discard pile behind the workshop -- a mound of broken and rejected pieces that accumulated between the quarterly clean-outs, when Pim carted the lot to the road for the grit-man. The fragment had been sitting on top of the pile, half-covered by a cracked cylinder that might once have been the base of a drinking vessel.

  Gerald had picked it up because the blue made him stop.

  He held it now against the wall, next to a piece of deep blue already pressed into the mortar between two river stones. The piece in the wall was darker. Older. Its surface had weathered to a faint cloudiness that the fragment in his hand did not have. But underneath the clouding the colour was the same -- the deep, saturated blue that Grandfather had told him once came from the old cobalt, the kind they stopped getting when Gerald was still an infant. The new cobalt ran lighter. This piece in his hand was old cobalt. Made by someone before the change. Made by Grandfather, probably, or by someone Grandfather had trained.

  Gerald tilted both pieces toward the low sun and watched the light pass through the pair of them -- the same blue, split by decades, one flush in the mortar and one loose in his fingers.

  He did not hear his father approach.

  The shadow came first.

  It fell across the wall to Gerald's right, long and angled, and for a moment he thought it was the gate pillar shifting as the sun dropped. Then the shadow sat down.

  Da lowered himself onto the stone bench beside the gate. The bench was built into the wall where it met the gate pillars -- a flat slab of river stone, wide enough for two, set into the masonry at a height that was comfortable for a man and too tall for Gerald, whose feet would not have reached the ground if he had been sitting on it. Da sat and rested his forearms on his knees and looked at the wall.

  He was still in his work clothes. His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, and his forearms were dark from the furnace heat, the fine hairs singed short the way they always were at the end of a working day. His hands hung between his knees, loose. He smelled of mineral heat and sweat and the faint iron tang that clung to anyone who spent the day near the tools.

  Gerald stayed where he was, crouched by the wall with the blue fragment in his hand. He did not stand. He did not ask why Da had come. The question was there -- present, heavy -- and the signal that it was safe to let it out did not arrive, and after a moment Gerald stopped waiting for it.

  They looked at the wall.

  The light was moving. Not quickly -- the sun did not drop quickly at this time of year, the long spring evenings stretching the last hour until it felt like something you could walk beside -- but steadily, the angle shifting degree by degree, and the wall changed with it. Colours that had been bright faded as the light passed them, and colours further along caught fire in their place. Gerald watched it. He had seen this a hundred times. But he had not watched it beside Da before, and the watching felt different with Da there. Quieter. The way sound changes in a room when another person enters it, even if neither of them speaks.

  The silence had room in it.

  Gerald's knees ached. He shifted and sat on the path instead, cross-legged, the packed dirt cool through his trousers. The blue fragment stayed in his hand.

  After a time -- Gerald could not have said how long, because the light was still moving and the wall was still changing and neither of those things had anything to do with how long a person had been sitting -- Da spoke.

  "Do you know how the glass got into this wall?"

  Gerald looked at him. Da was not looking at Gerald. He was looking at the wall, at a section near the gate pillar where the glass pieces were thickest, pressed so close together that the mortar between them was barely visible.

  "You put it there," Gerald said. "And Grandfather. And--"

  "Before that."

  Gerald did not answer, because he did not know what was before that.

  Da was quiet. He reached out and touched a piece of glass in the wall near his right knee -- a large, irregular chunk of amber, darker than the others, its surface pitted and rough. His finger rested on it, and the weight in it was the same weight his fingers carried on everything: measuring, knowing what he was touching.

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  "The man who built this wall was my great-great-grandfather's father," Da said. "He was not a patient man. He was a good glassblower, but he was not patient, and the things he made well he made because he worked at them until they came right, not because they came right the first time."

  A piece of pale green caught the sun and flared, bright and brief, and then faded.

  "He spent two days on a piece. A large bowl -- decorative, meant for a commission, the kind of work you take your time with because the buyer is paying for the time. He shaped it. He got it into the annealing oven and thought it was sound. When he opened the oven two days later the bowl had cracked down the middle. The walls were uneven -- thicker on one side than the other. The thick side cooled slower, and the glass could not hold the difference."

  Da said this flatly, without emphasis, as a sequence of events that had happened and could not be made to have happened differently.

  "He could not sell it. He could not use it. And he was angry enough that he could not throw it away, because throwing it away meant it was nothing, and two days of work is not nothing even when the work fails."

  His hand was still on the amber piece. He did not look at Gerald.

  "So he broke it and pressed the pieces into the wet mortar where the path met the road. He was mending the wall that week after a storm, and the mortar was wet, and the pieces were in his hand, and he pushed them in. That was all. He was not making something. He was putting his failure somewhere he would have to look at it."

  The sun had dropped another degree. The thick section of glass near the gate was dimming, the colours pulling inward, and a section further along -- past the bench, past the curve where the wall turned toward the beach road -- was catching the last direct light.

  "His son saw the pieces. When his son failed a piece -- a goblet that came out of the annealing with a twist in the stem -- he broke it and pressed the pieces in beside his father's."

  Da paused.

  "His son's son added two. My grandfather added his. My father added his. I have added mine."

  He took his hand from the wall. He looked at the whole of it -- the long stretch of river stone and glass running along the road, each piece a different colour, a different shape, a different failure from a different pair of hands.

  "Every piece in this wall is a mistake," Da said. "And every mistake taught somebody something."

  He did not say anything else. He stood -- Gerald heard his knees settle with the faint sound knees make when they have been still too long -- and walked back across the yard toward the workshop. Gerald heard the door open. He heard it close.

  The furnace hum continued, steady and unchanged.

  Gerald sat with the wall.

  The sun was lower now. The glass near the gate had gone quiet -- not dark, but muted, the colours visible but no longer lit from within. The mortar between the stones was more visible, and the pieces that had blazed a few minutes ago were shapes pressed into grey. A record of colour rather than colour itself.

  He looked at the amber chunk near the left gate pillar. The fat one, big as his palm, with the crack through its middle. Number one. The piece he always started counting from. He had never thought about who put it there. He had never thought about any of them that way -- as things that someone had made and failed and broken and pushed into wet mortar because they could not throw them away and could not keep them whole.

  He looked at the thin blade of dark blue. Number two.

  He looked at the cluster of pale green ovals. Three, four, five.

  The fragment in his hand was warm from his holding. Gerald turned it over. The bubble flaw on the convex face caught the last of the light and bent it, a small bright point that shifted as he tilted the glass. One edge was sharp enough to cut if he ran his thumb along it carelessly. He had been carrying it in his coat pocket for three days, wrapped in a scrap of cloth torn from a kitchen rag, and the cloth was still in his pocket, folded into a small square.

  He had kept the fragment because the blue was the kind of blue that made him stop. He had compared it to the blues in the wall because he wanted to see where it belonged. He had not thought, until now, about pressing it in.

  The mortar near the gate was old but not complete. Gaps where a piece had fallen out over the years, or where the mortar had cracked and left a space between the river stones wide enough for something small. Gerald found one. It was near the bottom of the wall, between two round grey stones, beside a wavy piece of amber that he had always thought looked like water -- a small frozen wave, mid-curl, caught before it could break.

  He pressed the blue fragment into the gap.

  The mortar was dry and firm and the fragment did not sink the way it would have into wet mortar. Gerald pressed harder, working the edge into the gap between the stones, angling it so the flat back sat against the mortar and the convex face with the bubble flaw faced outward. He pressed it level with his thumb. The sharp edge bit into the pad of his thumb -- not enough to cut, but enough to feel -- and the glass settled into the gap and held.

  He took his hand away.

  The fragment sat in the wall. Not perfectly -- slightly higher than the pieces around it, the edges not quite flush, the fresh blue against the weathered stone too new against everything else. But it held. It was in the wall.

  Gerald sat on the path and looked at it. The blue was almost black in the failing light. The bubble flaw was invisible without direct sun. It looked like any other piece of glass in the wall -- small, dark, unremarkable unless you knew where to find it.

  No one had seen him do it. The yard behind him was empty. The workshop door was closed. The kitchen windows were lit but the curtains were drawn against the evening, and the sounds from inside were supper sounds -- pots, voices, the clatter of bowls on the table. The road on the far side was quiet.

  Gerald stood. His knees were stiff from the cold ground. His right thumb had a shallow groove in it from the glass edge, a pale line pressed into the pad that he could feel when he curled his hand. The pocket of his coat was lighter by the weight of one small piece of blue.

  The front hall was warm.

  The smell of supper was in the air -- bread and onions and the heavy, settling smell of food that had been cooking a long time. Gerald hung his coat on the peg inside his door, went downstairs, washed his hands at the kitchen basin. The water stung the groove in his thumb. He sat at the table in his usual place.

  Sable was reading. Edric was talking to Nessa about something Gerald could not hear, his hands moving in the broad gestures he used when he was being funny. Mam came from the greenhouse corridor pulling the cloth from her hair and said something to Mary about the bread. Tom set the water jug on the table. Pim came in through the side door, late, and sat down hard enough that the bench complained.

  Gerald ate. The bread was warm. The onion soup was thick. The butter was the same butter from the same crock. He ate and listened to the table's noise. The groove in his thumb was still there when he finished -- a shallow line across the pad that would fade by morning.

  Outside, in the wall, the blue piece sat in its gap beside the frozen amber wave. The night came and the glass went dark with the rest of the wall, and in the morning the sun would find it the way the sun found everything there -- slowly, by degrees, one piece at a time, each piece given its moment before the angle moved on.