Jon’s left hand cleared the cellar door frame half a breath before gravity took the blue-glazed bowl.
Up on the scrubbed pine floorboards of the kitchen, Elin had just tossed the damp ash-pan rag into the wash bucket after wiping up the sixth-bell trivet spill and turned from the lower shelf of the hutch with the heavy stoneware buttermilk pitcher cradled against her hip. Above her shoulder, the wide earthenware oatmeal bowl—glazed with three concentric cobalt rings by a river potter thirty years ago—rocked over the warped lip of the upper pine board and dropped straight toward the hearth flagstones.
In the first six returns, that second crash of morning crockery—two minutes after the broth pot slipped on the trivet—had been the opening gun of Jon’s solitary panic. Even in the seventh life, he had arrived at the top step only in time to find Elin kneeling among the twelve jagged blue shards with a broom in her hand.
Not in the eighth.
Lunging across the threshold, Jon shot his scarred left hand under the falling rim two inches above the stone. His fingers closed cleanly around the curved earthenware belly. The downward momentum drove his knuckles against the dry mortar joint beside the hearth fender, scraping the fresh white scar on his left pinky against the grit without cracking the glaze.
