Evelyn Hart had learned to read the world in the angle of a tooth on a gear and the fainting cadence of a mainspring unwinding. Her shop smelled of brass and lemon oil and the dry chalk dust that collected where metal met cloth. By day the street outside gave the rhythm — a cartwheel, a dog’s bark, the bell from the church tower — and by habit she translated those sounds into the tiny conversations of mechanisms. The silver wristwatch lay open on her bench like a small patient. It had arrived in the morning wrapped in moth-eaten paper sent by her mother, a parcel that moved across the county with more hope than direction. Evelyn had not wanted to touch the watch at first; some objects carried a weight that worked against good tools. But she was a maker, and making was the way she kept grief from congealing into something that smelled like regret. The case back was worn at the edge where a thumb would keep time in a pocket. The movement inside had little peculiarities: a hairline scratch no larger than spider silk on the third wheel, a tiny darkened smear on the balance staff where an old improper repair had left a burr. Those traces spoke of a single pair of hands. Lucien's, she thought, because hands have memory even when people do not. He had left one night five years before and the house had learned to fold around the absence of him. People said time would soften the edges of such hollows, but she knew that the wrong kind of time could harden them like sugar left in the rain. The market clock had missed an hour that afternoon, the hands skipping with a faint mechanical cough and setting the vendors into a small argument about what had been measured and what had not. Jokes came first, then an examination. The baker’s boy returned an hour older and could not say how he had spent the missing span. Small things piled into a feeling: a wallet found in a hedge with receipts for hours that never were, a telephone call answered with a question that had been asked twice. In her shop, as dusk took the light away, the watch moved in a way she did not approve. It progressed, then slid back, as if it had been rehearsing a lie and could not maintain it. When the town slept, the escape wheel gave a tiny reluctant sigh, and a fingernail of cool metal slid from a seam and clinked on the bench. She bent close and read the shallow letters stamped there: KEEP. The tag was no larger than a fingernail and colder than she expected, heavy despite its size. She closed her fingers around it and in the quick pressure she felt both the humidity of the room and a memory like a smudge, the sense of someone on a porch stepping back into the wronging of a night. It made her mouth dry and precise like a wound that expected tending.