The watch began counting moments that never happened on a Tuesday.
It had been dead for years—its glass cracked, its leather strap stiff with age—but when Mara lifted it from the bottom of the drawer, the second hand shuddered and lurched forward. Not smoothly. Not correctly. It jumped in uneven pulses, skipping numbers, landing on times that made no sense. 3:17. 9:02. 12:44. Then back again.
Mara felt her breath catch.
She knew that watch. She had buried it with the rest of her life twelve years ago.
It had belonged to Elias.
Her father had given it to him the summer before the accident, telling him, “Time is only useful if you decide what it’s for.” Elias had laughed, too young to understand what a fragile thing time could be. Too young to know how quickly it could fracture.
Mara closed her fingers around the watch, and the room tilted—not physically, but emotionally, like a floor giving way beneath memory. The watch ticked louder now, each broken second echoing in her chest.
She hadn’t meant to find it. She was packing to move, boxing up a life she’d kept deliberately small. No photographs on the walls. No clocks that made noise. No reminders of before.
But the past, it seemed, had decided to keep time on its own terms.
That night, Mara dreamed of a moment that never happened.
She stood at the edge of the river, the air heavy with cicadas. Elias was there, dry and smiling, his hair still too long, his watch gleaming unbroken on his wrist.
“You didn’t come back,” he said gently.
“I did,” Mara replied in the dream. “I went back for you.”
But even as she spoke, she felt the lie unravel.
When she woke, the watch on her bedside table read 4:61.
Impossible. Wrong. Yet her hands shook as if it were telling the truth.
For years, Mara had carried a version of the past that allowed her to survive. The official story. The one she told herself and everyone else. Elias had slipped. The current had been strong. There was nothing she could have done.
But the watch kept ticking, and with every impossible moment, it offered another fragment—another version.
A memory surfaced while she stood in line at the grocery store: Elias on the riverbank, angry, shouting. Her own voice raised in response. Words sharp enough to wound.
I wish you’d just disappear, she had said.
The memory had been sealed away, wrapped in guilt and fear, labeled unimportant. Now it returned with brutal clarity.
That night, the watch jumped backward, landing on 2:13. The time stamped on the police report.
Mara pressed the watch to her chest and finally allowed herself to remember the rest.
She hadn’t slipped into the water after him. She had stood frozen, watching him struggle, her anger louder than her fear. Just for a moment. Just long enough for the current to decide for her.
The watch stopped ticking.
Silence filled the room, vast and unbearable.
Mara sobbed—not the quiet, controlled kind she had perfected, but the kind that cracked her open. She mourned not only Elias, but the person she had become in the aftermath: cautious, closed, convinced that love was dangerous because it could expose the worst parts of her.
By morning, the watch began again.
This time, the seconds moved forward—slowly, imperfectly, but in order.
Mara returned to the river that afternoon. She stood where she had stood before, the water calmer now, indifferent to her grief. She spoke aloud the truth she had never allowed herself to say.
“I was afraid,” she whispered. “And I let that fear decide for me.”
The watch warmed in her hand, its ticking steady.
Confronting the past didn’t erase it. Elias was still gone. The guilt still existed. But something shifted. The broken moments no longer haunted her—they informed her.
She understood now that avoiding time didn’t stop it from shaping her. Only facing it could.
Weeks later, Mara hung clocks on her walls again. She let herself form connections she might lose. She volunteered at the river rescue station, teaching children how to respect the water, how to act instead of freeze.
The watch rests on her desk, still cracked, still imperfect. It keeps time differently than other watches. It reminds her not of what could have been, but of what must be chosen.
Because the future, unlike the past, is a moment that still waits to happen.
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