Wendell Prine had spent thirty-one years restoring antique clocks, which meant he knew a thing or two about patience and the sound of something about to break. At sixty-two, he lived alone above his shop in a river town that smelled of diesel and fried dough, and he’d convinced himself that quiet was the same thing as peace.
Then Nadine Kessler walked in with a grandfather clock and a laugh that filled the room like sunlight through a church window.
She was his age, maybe a year or two past, a widow who ran the community theater and wore her gray hair pinned up with a pencil. She set her hands on his workbench and leaned close—close enough that Wendell caught lavender and sawdust and something warmer underneath. “It stopped chiming the night my husband died,” she said. “I figure that’s either poetic or broken.”
“Usually both,” he said, and she smiled like he’d passed a test.
He should have quoted her a price and sent her on her way. Instead he heard himself offer to make a house call, and the way her eyebrows lifted told him she’d heard the invitation hiding inside the repair.
The clock sat in her front parlor, and Wendell spent a week finding excuses to return to it. She’d bring him sweet tea, then coffee, then a glass of bourbon when the evenings got long. She’d sit too near while he worked, her knee a whisper from his, and ask questions that had nothing to do with gears. What did his wife leave behind besides the shop? Did he ever get lonely in that apartment? He answered honestly, which surprised him, and she listened without flinching, which undid him a little.
The trouble arrived with the theater’s spring gala. Nadine had cast herself opposite a slick-haired contractor named Dale, and the play was full of longing looks and hands that lingered. Wendell told himself it was none of his business. He told himself that again at the dress rehearsal, standing in the back with a punch cup, watching Dale’s palm settle on the small of her back. Something hot and unreasonable rose in his chest—disgust at his own jealousy, desire he had no right to, the absurd fury of a man who’d been alone so long he’d forgotten he could feel this way.
He left without saying goodbye.
She found him two days later, elbow-deep in a cuckoo clock, and planted herself in his doorway with her arms crossed. “You disappeared,” she said. “I noticed.”
“It was late. You were busy.”
“I was acting, Wendell. It’s a play. The man’s hands are not the point.” She stepped closer, and her voice dropped. “You want to know the point? I stopped the clock because I stopped hearing anything worth waking up for. Then a careful man with gray hands told me it was both poetic and broken, and I thought—there he is. There’s the one who hears things.”
His throat went dry. She was near enough now that he could see the flecks of green in her eyes and the tiny scar by her lip. Her fingers brushed his wrist, light as a moth, and every nerve in his arm stood at attention.
“I’m not good at this,” he said.
“I know.” Her smile turned sly. “You’re good at clocks. I’m asking you to be good at something else.”
He kissed her then, or she kissed him—the distinction got lost in the warm press of it, her hand curling around his neck, his palm finding the curve of her waist. The parlor clock chimed the hour from her house across town, or maybe that was only his heart, finally keeping time.
The gala came and went. Dale’s character got his heart broken, as written, and Nadine took her bows to real applause. Wendell sat in the third row and clapped until his palms stung. Afterward, in the empty lobby, she came to him still smelling of stage makeup and roses, and slipped her arm through his like it had always belonged there.
“Walk me home,” she said.
So he did, past the river and the diner lights, her shoulder bumping his, the night air cool and sweet. At her gate she turned, and he kissed her goodnight without asking, and she hummed against his mouth like a clock striking true. Wendell walked back to his shop with his hands in his pockets and a grin he couldn’t put away, and when he climbed the stairs he left the door to the apartment open behind him.
