The Cost of Clay
- Slow Burn
- Opposites Attract
- Found Family
- Workplace
- Feel-Good
- Emotional
She needs everything in writing. He has spent six years keeping the real numbers off the page.
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The story
The story
She needs everything in writing. He has spent six years keeping the real numbers off the page.
The day a certified letter gives Cinder Row Ceramics twelve weeks to prove it can carry its foundry building, operations manager Julian Halloran slides the notice into his bottom drawer and tells the youth teacher to plan a big spring term. That night a stranger at open class lets him brace her elbow, then asks who keeps his books.
She is Nadia Kline, the City of Hatherby's strategist on the file, and she wants dates, costs and signatures. He carries everything himself: his skipped pay, the repairs he never gets to, a loan nobody else knows about. She learned on someone else's project what an undated promise is worth, and she has a drawer of her own.
With the kiln failing on a schedule she can calculate and eleven kids riding on the paperwork, every step toward each other costs a disclosure neither wants to make, and the pull between them gets harder to file under business.
A steamy slow-burn workplace romance about a pottery co-op fighting for its lease, and what it costs to let someone check your numbers.
Spice map
Where it gets hot
Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.
The world
Know your way around
Organization
- Cinder Row Ceramics
- The co-op pottery studio at the heart of the story, with a gallery, open classes, a youth program and exactly one kiln. It has been the tenant in an old foundry on Foundry Row for six years.
- Office of Economic Development
- Nadia's department at the City of Hatherby. It assigns a strategist to the studio's file after Councilwoman Hargrove's office flags the building for intervention review.
- Ridgeline Holdings
- The company that owns the studio's building. Its certified letter gives the co-op twelve weeks to prove, with verified records, that it can cover the building's costs.
Character
- Dana Whitcombe
- The member who works the studio's gallery, sliding finished mugs into shipping boxes and printing the drop-in rate on the chalkboard.
- Julian Halloran
- The potter who has run the studio's operations for six years, with steady hands and a habit of saying 'It'll hold.' He keeps the kiln firing and the members calm by carrying the hard numbers himself, and he never says one out loud.
- Marcus Feld
- The Ridgeline Holdings portfolio manager whose signature closes the studio's notice. It is small and neat, like the signature of a man who signs many letters and has stopped feeling them.
- Nadia Kline
- The City of Hatherby strategist assigned to the studio's file, to assess whether the business is viable and build a fundable plan if one exists. Her practice is site visits without an appointment, so she sees how a business runs before anyone tidies it for her.
- Owen Brac
- The studio's teacher, who runs the youth program, eleven kids this term, and never touches a kid's pot without asking twice. He once watched a city program die mid-term, so he checks whether a promise has a body behind it.
- Petra Lindqvist
- The studio's kiln tech, who reads instruments the way other people read clocks and writes in the maintenance log in square print. To Julian, she is the kindest skeptic he knows.
- Sofia Reyes
- The member behind the studio's glazes, who left a corporate job so she would never be a line item again. She is chasing a blue that breaks blue at the edge, for a county-seat buyer who wants two hundred mugs and sixty planters in it.
Place
- Foundry Row
- The old foundry by the river where the studio rents its space, and the row it stands on. It still smells of wet iron and mineral steam, and everything in it complains, which Julian calls the deal you make with old foundries.
Craft
- Greenware
- Pots that are shaped and dried but not yet fired, still soft enough to break if you breathe on them wrong. A first, lower firing turns greenware into bisqueware, ready for glaze.
- Thermocouple
- The wire sensor that tells a kiln's controller how hot the kiln really is. Old wire drifts, and when the studio's primary one reads out of range, the controller flashes a small amber code, Err: TC1.
- Witness cones
- Small clay cones set in the kiln beside the work, each made to bend at a known heat. The studio fires to cone 6, and the cones tell the truth about the fire even when the meter doesn't.
Term
- Notice of Opportunity to Cure
- Ridgeline's formal notice to the studio. Within eighty-four days the co-op must show verified records of revenue that covers the building's carrying costs, as set out in a table called Schedule A, or the landlord may decline to renew the lease.
- The deferred column
- The third column in the private book Julian keeps in a drawer under the spare aprons, the one for what he is carrying. It tracks the costs he absorbs himself so the members never have to see them, from his own skipped pay to the repairs he keeps putting off.
Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.
