Marcus Hale had spent thirty-one years restoring antique clocks, and he liked his life the way he liked his movements—precise, quiet, and free of surprises. At sixty-two, the widower ran a cramped shop on the south side of town, surrounded by the soft ticking of a hundred small hearts. His flaw was certainty. He believed he had already learned everything worth knowing about people.
Then the historical society rented the storefront next door for a traveling exhibit on the Roaring Twenties, and a woman named Della Ruiz began hauling crates past his window every morning.
She was a museum curator from Chicago, fifty-something, with silver-streaked hair pinned up and forearms that suggested she lifted more than paperwork. She wore red reading glasses and cursed softly at stubborn packing tape. Marcus watched her from behind a half-disassembled grandfather clock, telling himself he was merely observing a disturbance to his routine.
The disturbance knocked on his door on a Tuesday. Della needed a favor—her display case was jammed, and she’d heard he was the man with the delicate touch. She said it with a straight face, but her dark eyes held a glint that made his ears go hot.
“I’ve heard that rumor,” he said.
“I’m counting on it.”
She stood too close while he worked the lock. He could smell lavender soap and the coffee on her breath. Her shoulder brushed his arm when she leaned in to watch, and neither of them moved away. The lock gave way with a click, and she laughed—low and warm—and touched his wrist in thanks. The touch lasted a second too long.
Marcus pulled back as if burned. A woman in his shop, in his life, felt like a betrayal of Eleanor. But the memory of that wrist touch followed him home and sat with him at dinner.
The exhibit opened Friday. He told himself he wouldn’t go. He went.
Della wore a black dress with a beaded collar and moved through the crowd like she owned it. When she spotted him, her face changed—softened, then sharpened with amusement. She crossed the room and hooked her arm through his without asking.
“You came.”
“I was walking by.”
“You were not.”
She steered him to the exhibit, narrating the history of speakeasies and jazz and women who cut their hair short and dared the world to object. Her hand stayed on his arm. Her voice dropped low when she described the illicit thrill of a hidden bar, and Marcus felt the floor tilt.
“You disapprove,” she said, reading his face.
“I don’t know what I feel.”
“That’s allowed, you know. At our age.”
The crowd thinned. She led him to a back room where the real artifacts were stored—a velvet chaise, a phonograph, a silver flask. The door clicked shut. She poured two fingers of whiskey into the flask cap and handed it to him. Their fingers overlapped on the silver. She didn’t let go.
“You’ve been dodging me all week,” she said. “I want to know why.”
“Because you’re trouble.”
“I’m a curator from Chicago with a bad knee and a fondness for old things.” She stepped closer. “What are you afraid of, Marcus?”
He could have lied. Instead he told her about Eleanor, about the years of quiet grief, about the way the shop had become a museum of his own making. Della listened without pity. When he finished, she took the flask from his hand and drank, and her eyes never left his.
“I’m not asking you to forget her,” she said. “I’m asking you to stop being a clock. Ticking alone in a room.”
He should have walked out. He knew it. And then she reached up and straightened his collar—a slow, deliberate movement—and her knuckles grazed the skin of his neck. The sensation traveled down his spine like a struck tuning fork.
He kissed her. Or she kissed him. The distinction dissolved. Her lips tasted of whiskey and her hand found the back of his neck and held him there, and the phonograph in the corner sat silent while the room rang with the sound of two people deciding, at long last, to be alive.
Afterward they sat on the velvet chaise, shoulders touching, watching the streetlights come on through the window.
“I don’t know what this is,” he said.
“It’s a beginning,” Della said. “Don’t overthink it. You’ll ruin the mechanism.”
Marcus laughed—a rusty, unpracticed sound. He reached over and laced his fingers through hers. The exhibit closed Sunday, but she had a month of cataloging left, and he had a shop full of clocks that suddenly seemed to tick a little faster.
