Lucien carried the basket across the wall at four o'clock on Friday afternoon, and it was the most cowardly thing he had ever done on purpose.

It held six of Hester's Winesaps, polished on his sleeve until they shone, and nothing else. No note. He had written three, and torn up each. The first had been too long. The second had said Thank you for the door, which was true, and which sounded exactly like what it was, a man making a very small thing out of a very large one. The third had said only Silas, and he had stared at that single word for several minutes before the pen had fallen from his fingers.

So: apples. Apples were safe. Apples were what a neighbor brought a neighbor. Apples had been a currency between the two of them once, long ago, when a boy of sixteen could not think how to say a thing and had simply thrown one over a wall.

He had not been thinking about that. He had been very careful.

The green gate shrieked. He lifted it with the old twist, one hand under the rail, and went through into the Oakhurst yard with his heart beating hard enough to rattle the fruit.

The workshop door stood open. Warm air spilled out of it, smelling of clay and cold ash. Inside, the long room was bright with the low gold light of a late October afternoon, and in the middle of it, hunched over the wheel with his sleeves pushed to the elbow and his hands buried in a spinning column of wet clay, was Silas.

Lucien stopped in the doorway.

He had seen it a thousand times. At sixteen, at eighteen, at twenty-two. He had never once, in all those years, grown used to it. The ease of it. The way the clay rose between those broad brown hands as if it wanted to, as if it had only been waiting for permission. Silas's whole body bent toward the work, the line of his back, the tilt of his head, the long lean pull of a forearm. There was a smear of gray slip across one cheekbone. His lower lip was caught in his teeth. He was entirely, deeply, privately absorbed, and the wheel hummed, and the walls of the pot grew up beneath his thumbs, smooth and tall and thin as an eggshell.

Lucien's throat tightened. He stood with the basket against his hip and did not make a sound.

The wheel slowed. Silas lifted his foot. The pot, a tall, narrow vase the color of wet slate, stood spinning to a stop, perfect, and he sat back and looked at it with a small, private, entirely unguarded expression, a look Lucien had last seen nine years ago.

Then he glanced up and saw him, and the look went out like a snuffed candle.

"You've been standing there a while," Silas said.

"A minute."

"Two."

"I didn't want to" Lucien lifted the basket. "Interrupt. I brought these. Hester gave me too many. I can't eat that many apples, I'd be sick, and I thought. They're Winesaps. They're sour. You like the sour ones."

He heard himself. He heard exactly how it sounded. You like the sour ones, as if he had any right to know it still.

Silas looked at the basket for a long moment. He wiped his hands on a rag, slowly, one finger at a time. "I don't take payment for fixing a door."

"It's not payment."

"What is it, then?"

A good question. Lucien had asked it of himself all afternoon. "An apology for the screwdriver," he said. "And thank you. And, I don't know. An attempt at being a good neighbor. I've been told I should be."

"By Camille."

"By the entire town, I think."

The corner of Silas's mouth moved. It was not a smile. It was the place where one might have been. He set the rag down. "Put them on the shelf by the window."

Lucien crossed the room. It was not a long room, and every step was audible. He set the basket on the shelf and straightened, and found that he was standing among Silas's work.

It was everywhere. Cups on the long table, rows of them, pale green and rust-flecked and deep smoky blue. Tall jars with shoulders of drifting ash glaze. A set of shallow bowls, each with a thumbprint pressed into the foot. A teapot shaped like a sleeping bird. Lucien turned slowly, his fingertips hovering above the shelves, not quite touching, and he felt a strange, spreading ache in his chest, because he knew them.

Not these pots. Their ancestors. The same celadon he had chased through a hundred failed tests at nineteen. The same thumbprint that Silas pressed into the foot of everything he made, a private mark, a signature too small for anyone but a person who had held his hand to see. The shape of the handles. The curve of the lip. Nine years had passed, and every bowl in the room still said, in a voice only he could hear: this one is Silas's.

He lifted a mug from the table, a plain one, very simple, pale green, with a thumb-hollowed handle. He turned it in his palm.

"You use the same hollow," he said. "For the thumb."

"It's a good hollow."

"Your father's?"

"Mine." A pause. "I worked it out the summer I was seventeen. On a day when someone kept distracting me from a perfectly good wheel."

Lucien's fingers tightened on the mug. He looked up.

Silas was not looking at him. He was looking at the vase on the wheel, with his jaw set, with a faint flush along the line of his cheekbone beneath the gray smear. He had said it as a fact, flatly. And he had heard what he had said, and was waiting, rigid, for the roof to fall.

Lucien set the mug down very gently.

"I should," he said, "I should say something about"

"No." Silas's voice was low and quite steady. "Not today."

"Silas"

"I'm not saying never. I'm saying not in the middle of a Friday with a wet pot on the wheel and a basket of apples on the shelf." He turned then, finally, and looked at him, and the whole force of that dark, level gaze landed in the center of Lucien's chest. "I can't do it like this. It has to be on purpose. If you say it, I'll hear it, and I'll want it to have been said when we were both ready. Not blurted. Not by accident, over the apples."

"All right," Lucien said. His voice was unsteady. "All right."

"So we need rules."

"Rules."

"For the next few weeks. You're here until the house sells. I'm here, because it's my house and my kiln and my entire life. We're neighbors. We are going to be seeing each other across a wall for a month, and I'd like to do it without either of us going quietly insane." He picked up a pencil from the bench, apparently for something to hold. "Terms and conditions."

Lucien stared at him. And then, helplessly, because the whole thing was so absurd and so entirely like the boy he had once known, he laughed.

It was a short, rusty sound, a laugh that had lain unused for months and didn't know how to begin. Silas's eyebrows went up. A beat later, grudgingly, a corner of his mouth went with them.

"What," said Silas.

"Nothing. You sound like a lawyer."

"I sound like someone who's had nine years to draft it." He tapped the pencil on the bench. "Rule one. We don't talk about the past unless one of us says so. Out loud. In advance. With warning."

"Like a fire alarm."

"Exactly like a fire alarm. Rule two. You don't come into the house, workshop, or kiln shed without telling me. No wandering in. No appearing."

"I appeared in the gate."

"The gate's fine. Gate counts as knocking." He scratched something on the back of a glaze-test card. "Rule three. If either of us needs something, a ladder, a hammer, a decent screwdriver, we ask. Out loud. No leaving things on walls."

The words hung in the air. Lucien felt his face go warm. He thought of a clay bowl sitting on a stone, warm under his palm, a small red eye glowing through the ash.

"You left it for me," he said, very low.

"I'm not discussing that."

"It was still warm this morning. You came back and fed it."

"It's rule three. It's void. It's an old rule. Rule three starts today." Silas wasn't looking at him. His ears had gone dark red. "I'll be your neighbor. I'll lend you tools. I'll fix doors if they're going to fall on someone. That's all. That's what this is. A very courteous arrangement between two adults who have a wall in common."

"That's all," Lucien said.

"That's all."

He did not believe it. He did not think Silas believed it either. But they stood in the long gold light on either side of the glaze table, with a pencil and a card and a basket of apples between them, and both nodded, like two negotiators sealing a treaty over a smoldering border.

He took a sheet of paper from the bench and wrote the rules down, because that was what he did with chaos: he made it into a score. Silas read it over his shoulder, and snorted at the handwriting, and signed it with a flourish at the bottom. S. Oakhurst, party of the first part. Lucien signed beneath. L. Marsh, party of the second. Silas pinned it with a clay nail to the corkboard by the door, between a lunch menu and a calendar of firings.

That was how it started.

He should have left then. It would have been the clean thing. But Silas, with the air of a man granting a very reluctant favor, said, "You might as well look at the rest. Since you're here." And Lucien, who had not been looking forward to the empty house, said, "I'd like that."

So he did. He walked the length of the workshop with his hands clasped behind him, as he had once walked through a museum, and Silas followed a pace behind, explaining nothing and correcting everything. A shelf of test tiles, forty-one of them, ranged in a row on the windowsill, in colors that began as dull red and went on to brown and plum and a dead, bruised violet. "Copper red," Silas said. "It doesn't work. It's not going to work. I'm very close." A rack of bisque cups with unglazed rims. A kick wheel in the corner, with a cracked seat. A chipped enamel mug on a nail with a handwritten tag that said Dad's.

Lucien caught himself noticing everything. The way Silas stacked his cups, rim down, in sets of five. The way he kept the tea strainer in a particular small bowl. The way he lined up his tools in order of size on the bench, exactly as he had at seventeen. Nine years, and not one habit had moved. It struck Lucien like a held chord: that a man could change so much, could go broader, quieter, grayer at the temples, could build a business and a life and a reputation, and still keep his spoons in the same drawer.

"What are you looking at?" Silas said.

"Nothing. Your cups."

"They're very good cups."

"They are," Lucien said, and meant it.

By the north window Silas stopped, and gestured through the glass at the broad, low, tilted field beyond the fence, the long, open slope behind the Marsh shed, glowing amber in the light.

"That ground," he said, and then stopped, as if the words had caught in a net.

Lucien turned. "What about it?"

"It's flat. Good drainage. South-facing." Silas's voice was careful and uninflected. "It's rather a lot of room. For a person who needed it. For a kiln, say. A big one. If someone had the notion."

He stopped again. His throat worked. He stood looking out at the slope, and the evening gilded the side of his face, and for a moment Lucien saw something in it he could not name, something wide and hungry and frightened, the face of a man standing at the edge of a very long drop.

"Do you want to buy it?" Lucien asked.

The silence that followed was one of the loudest he had ever heard.

"That's not," Silas said, and his whole face closed, shutter by shutter, until the stranger was back. "That's not your business."

The words hit like a slap. Lucien took half a step back. "I only meant"

"I know what you meant." It was cold. Perfectly polite, and cold as river stone. "The land's not mine. The land's on the market. There's nothing to discuss. If I wanted it, I would have put in an offer, and I haven't. Thank you for the apples."

"Silas."

"I have a wheel to finish."

It was a dismissal. It could not have been plainer. Lucien stood for a heartbeat longer, feeling the exact shape of the mistake, a small, sharp, unmistakable pain in the place where something had nearly opened. He did not understand what he had touched. He only understood that he had touched it, and that he had been very close to something, and had fumbled it.

"Of course," he said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just go."

He went. He lifted the green gate and let it fall behind him, and the latch gave its small clean click, and he walked up the long slope through the grass with his hands in his pockets and the cold air stinging his eyes.

He did not understand. That was the worst of it. He had said the wrong thing in the right place, and the hurt had come up in Silas's face like a bruise, and it had had nothing to do with the apples, nothing to do with the rules. It had come from somewhere he could not see. He turned it over as he climbed. The land. A kiln. If someone had the notion.

It was the sort of thing a man said who had wanted a thing for a very long time and had been told, once, that he was not allowed.

At the top of the garden he stopped and looked back.

The Oakhurst yard lay below him, small and warm in the failing light. The workshop door still stood open, and in the square of gold it made he could see Silas, who had not gone back to the wheel. He was standing at the north window with his arms folded tight across his chest, looking out at the empty slope behind the Marsh shed, and he looked, from this distance, so alone that Lucien's heart turned over in him like a stone in a stream.

Silas lifted his hand, slowly, and pressed it flat to the glass.

Lucien could not hear him. He was too far. But he saw his lips move, three words, and he did not need to hear them to know what the shape of them was. He had spent his whole life learning to read a silence. It was the one skill his father had given him that he could not lay down.

I can't ask him.

He stood there in the cold, in the dying light, holding a rule sheet in his head, and felt the first small, terrible thread of understanding begin to pull.