Chapter Twenty-Five

The fallout was not clean.

It never is.

The journalist’s piece had done its job. Tracey’s following evaporated. Marcus retreated into the shadowy corners of LinkedIn, where he announced himself as a “cultural realignment strategist” and posted stock images of lightbulbs beside vague warnings about toxic workplaces.

Their disciples drifted too.

But the mess remained everywhere.

Emails misrouted.

Refunds owed.

Parents calling at dawn about phantom kids’ classes Tracey had advertised but never scheduled.

One dad stood at the roller door holding a bag of sausages and looking wounded.

“Sausage and Ceramics,” he said. “We bought the meat.”

Inside, Mayfield still smelled faintly of singed nerves.

The roller door rattled open each morning, but some days the only sound was the dog’s claws clicking across concrete.

Ruth moved through it like a general in a war she had not chosen but now intended to win.

Clipboards became shields.

Phone calls became campaigns.

Refunds became rituals.

Sally sat behind the counter with a new notebook.

Not the damp despair journal of the months before.

A crisp pad with a stiff spine.

At the top of each page she wrote one word:

BOUNDARIES

It looked like both a fence and a lifeline.

She had once thought Mayfield was built on feelings.

Feelings had nearly killed it.

Boundaries, she suspected, might save it.

And as if summoned by that private vow, new students began appearing.

Arthur arrived first.

Retired tram driver.

Hands like limestone.

Declared ambition:

“A teapot that doesn’t dribble like a drunk uncle.”

Then came Miranda, an NDIS participant who wheeled in with her support worker, examined the throwing wheel and announced:

“That’s just a glorified salad spinner.”

She laughed so hard at her own joke that she sprayed sponge water across the wall.

They were not glamorous.

They were not hashtags.

They arrived with walkers, thermoses, carers and unfiltered stories about neighbours.

They were messy.

Human.

Grateful.

And against all odds, they made Mayfield feel like a studio again.

The absurdities remained.

Arthur sang Slim Dusty while centring clay, drowning out Ruth’s safety instructions.

Miranda brought her budgie in a cage “for emotional support,” and the bird screamed every time the kiln door opened.

Sally discovered Tracey had left behind three free-trial booking platforms still active.

One midnight the inbox pinged with thirty-two requests for:

“erotic hand-building.”

Sally shut the laptop like a guillotine.

Still, momentum shifted.

The KC ghost-wrote policies so tight even the dog probably needed a risk assessment to pee.

Ruth brandished legislative quotes like bayonets.

And Sally — brittle, blinking — began to believe survival might be possible.

But what made it possible was not only new faces.

It was the people who had never left.

William, first.

He had been there the whole time.

Steady as stone.

While Tracey raged and Marcus drifted, William fixed shelves, reglued kiln bricks and brought tea during collapses.

When other people scattered, he arrived with his thermos and simply worked.

One day Sally looked at him across the office, suddenly dazed by his ongoing presence.

“You’re still here.”

William raised an eyebrow.

“Where else would I be?”

Then Ethan.

If William was ballast, Ethan was warmth.

He remained near the coffee machine, sliding mugs across to students, strangers and posties with equal ceremony.

When he wasn’t pulling shots, he swept floors, restocked cups and greeted Sally each morning with a soft:

“Welcome.”

As though she had not already unlocked the door.

He made Mayfield smell like coffee instead of crisis.

And Tina.

No illusions.

No hashtags.

No patience for theatre.

She had seen through the nonsense from the beginning and kept showing up anyway: arms folded, eyes sharp, ready to fix a stool, throw a pot or cut through a meeting with one sentence.

“Young idiots with too many feelings,”

she muttered one afternoon, while restoring order to the hand-building shelf.

The studio floorboards seemed anchored by her alone.

They had been Mayfield’s immune system.

Unflashy.

Relentless.

Impossible to frighten away.

Without them, Sally knew, the place would have died.

Others drifted back slowly.

Ebony arrived carrying a box of salvaged studio tools she had quietly protected during the worst of it.

She laid them out like relics returned to an altar, then immediately began oiling hinges and tightening bolts.

Dawn swept in with eucalyptus oil and certainty.

“I always knew you’d turn it around.”

She had, technically, vanished at the first sign of serious conflict.

But she also bought clay and offered to run a Saturday meditation workshop, so Ruth grudgingly wrote her name on the whiteboard.

The rhythm re-knit itself.

Unevenly.

But surely.

One evening Sally found herself in the office with William fixing a jammed drawer, Ethan making coffee and Tina heckling from the doorway.

“For God’s sake, Sally. You don’t need another notebook. You need a holiday.”

Sally laughed.

Really laughed.

For the first time in months.

Even the teenagers noticed.

One morning over Vegemite toast, the eldest said:

“Mum, you’re not crying at the kitchen table anymore.”

Sally smirked.

“That’s because I’m crying in the studio now. Progress.”

They all laughed.

For once, it wasn’t bitter.

Mayfield remained bruised.

Scarred.

Still expensive.

Still vulnerable.

But alive.

And somehow, that felt like victory.