She'd priced the bowl at four dollars. Cream stoneware, the kind her mother used for everything — soup, cereal, the almonds she ate one at a time while reading. Perfectly ordinary. The sort of thing you stop seeing after twenty years.
The woman who picked it up turned it over immediately. Not the way you check a price tag — the way you check provenance. One hand cupping the rim, the other on the foot, rotating.
"Studio piece," the woman said.
"It's just a bowl." She heard herself say it and knew it was wrong even as it came out.
The woman ran her thumb along the foot ring. "See the trimming here? Machine-made bowls have uniform walls. This one's thicker on the south side — the potter's right hand was stronger than the left. And the glaze pools here at the foot where they held it to dip." She turned it further. "There's a mark."
"There's no mark."
"Under the glaze. Feel."
She took the bowl back and pressed her thumb where the woman pointed. Under the smooth surface, a slight depression. Letters, maybe, or a symbol, fired under and sealed over. She'd held this bowl a thousand times and never turned it upside down. Why would she? It held soup.
"Could be a potter's mark," the woman said. "Could be initials. Hard to tell without scraping the glaze, and you wouldn't want to."
"No."
"I'd give you thirty."
She looked at the four-dollar sticker. She looked at the bowl, upside down in her hands for the first time, the foot ring rough where it had sat on a kiln shelf, the glaze thin at the rim where gravity had pulled it during firing.
"It's not for sale."
The woman nodded — no surprise — and moved down the table.
She set the bowl right-side up again. It looked the same as it always had: cream, round, slightly deeper than standard. Her mother's bowl for almonds. But she could still feel the mark under her thumb, the letters she couldn't read through the glaze, put there by someone who knew they'd be sealed over. Not hidden. Just underneath.
She peeled off the sticker.