June's shop was the kind of place that made nonsense feel like a credible profession. Its sign had long given up the pretense of neat paint; the letters were hand-carved and slightly askew, as if whoever made them had been distracted by the possibility of repair. The bell over the door chimed in a tone that suggested the proprietor knew the exact note to use for announcing small catastrophes. Inside, the air smelled of oil and lemon and something faintly metallic that might have been optimism or might have been rust.
Mara had walked past the storefront a dozen times without making the effort to go in. You could live a long life on a small coastal town's first impressions and the town would accept that as a kind of mercy. But the watch had been a compass in her pocket, and compasses have a way of pointing to the single place you most need to be. She pushed open the door and let the bell say what she had yet to admit out loud.
The shop was cramped in the way that made it hospitable: narrow aisles between low shelves, a workbench in the back surrounded by jars of screws and spools of wire. Out of habit Mara registered the structural function of the space—how the shelf brackets held the weight of collections of lived-in things, how the bench light might be positioned to catch the smallest of mechanisms while the proprietor worked. It was a kind of architecture she understood no matter the scale.
June looked up from beneath the angle of a lamp with the practiced intensity of someone who had never been satisfied by the surface of things. She wore a bandana at her hairline like a crown made of practical cloth, and the palms of her hands were still dusted with solder. She smiled when she saw Mara as if a small equation had matched.
"You came," she said, more a statement than a question.
"I did." Mara closed the door behind her and felt the physical thud as if that were a lid closing on one portion of her day. "It felt like the right place to bring it." She said the word watch as if the syllable itself were a fragile coin she was handing over.
June took the pocket watch with a deliberation that bordered on ceremony. She did not rush to pry it open but held it in both hands like someone assessing the heart rate of a stranger. "Old brass has good memory," she said. "So do people who wind them." She turned it so the cloudy face caught the light. Up close the engraving of the tiny compass rose seemed less like a decorative wink than an insistence: choose.
Mara flinched at that. Choice was the ledger she could no longer balance. "Do you...do you fix watches?" she asked, trying to sound casual.
June snorted softly. "I fix what I can. I clean, I oil. I coax stubborn things." She set the watch on the bench beside an open box of clock hands and reached for a loupe. "How did he come by this?" she asked, voice low enough that the shop and its treasures seemed to be leaning in.
"For as long as I can remember, he collected things that needed hands," Mara said. "He liked things that made sound. He thought you could pull an order from something by listening to it long enough." She had meant to be brief, but the words had weight and she let them fall. "He left this with a note."
June read the note with the quick, trained eye of someone who learned the history of a thing by the patience of its edges. Her lips moved slightly as she read—there was no mockery in it, only an appraisal that sometimes kindness needs a measuring stick.
"There's more than one way to start again." She tapped the note's crease. "Not bad handwriting for a man who never learned to sit still."
June popped open the back of the watch with a deft twist. The interior was a small, crowded city of cogs and tiny springs. A faint residue of something—sea-salt, maybe, or coffee from someone who liked to work close to the heat of a cup—had settled in the corners.
"No tick," she murmured, aligning a screwdriver. "Someone wants to be dramatic and make a point. Do you want it fixed, Mara?"
Mara hesitated, the name a small cool stone in her mouth. "I don't know what I want. I know I don't want it to be dead in my pocket." She swallowed. "But I don't want you to—" She stopped. The sentence wanted to be practical and became sentimental halfway through. "I don't want you to make it more than it is."
June's hands stilled. "I don't make things into what they're not." She looked up. "I try to reveal what they can do. Fixing is not pretending to be something bigger. It's acknowledging a piece's function and helping it be that again."
Mara watched June work. The older woman's fingers moved with the kind of certainty Mara always envied: precise, quiet, the history of making held in the knuckles. She had wanted, secretly and without permission, for the watch to be miraculous. The truth was she wanted to wind it and have the sound of the past come back with the promise that everything could be righted. But June's steady hand suggested a different relationship—one that started with recognition, not with wishcraft.
"You mentioned the lighthouse the other day," Mara said, crouching to peer at the way June's tools gathered like a small congregation. "You said something had been—it was a seam? You sounded ridiculous, but I forget who I am when I'm afraid enough to listen to ridiculousness."
June smiled that same short smile. "I said a seam. I said it because people come into my shop with pieces of themselves frayed and expect me to sew them up. Sometimes things are only literal and sometimes they're more—concepts. There's a place where the land and the light meet in such a way that people who are...sensitive notice a difference. Some say it's the angle of the rocks, some that the old lighthouse wiring has a flux. Most people call it folklore."
Mara felt a small, involuntary pull in her chest at the word sensitive. She had measured so many things that she had grown suspicious of anything that asked to be measured in feelings. "Is it dangerous?" she asked.
"It depends what you bring with you," June said. "If you go to look for what you've lost and you believe you can force its return, you might find the problem grows. If you go to see what—seeing does—then you might go home with news. Either way, the lighthouse tends to make things show themselves."
"Show themselves," Mara repeated. The phrase was a soft hinge for a door she had been avoiding. To have something show itself was different from making something happen. It felt like art instead of construction; it felt like being offered data rather than a blueprint. She found herself wanting to go, not out of hope that she might fix Nolan's absence, but because she wanted the world to show itself as less purposefully cruel. As if the lighthouse might be a kind of honest mirror rather than a place that measured her failure.
June wound the watch with a small key and the gears shuddered as if waking from sleep. There was a single click and then an almost inaudible shiver of motion. The hand that had been steady with solder trembled for a second, then settled.
"You heard that?" Mara asked, surprised.
"Listen harder," June said.
Mara pressed her face closer to the bench and felt the invisible reach of time inside the watch. For a breath she thought she heard, not ticking, but the sound of a room full of voices—one of them, younger, Nolan's laugh as if someone had cued a memory reel for her ears. She jerked back as if struck. "I—" She could not find the sentence. It felt like feeling her own reflection step out of the glass.
June did not look surprised. "Things remember the hands that move them," she said. "Sometimes they remember the people who put faith into them. Be careful—your need can coax them into offering more than they intend. It's not always safe to stir the things that remember us."
Mara tucked the watch against her palm like a salve. Strange hope nagged at the edges of her grief the way a draft pryed at a loose window frame. After Nolan died she had declared an exile from chance; she had sworn, silently and with the rigid honesty of someone who can draw a straight line, to do only what was measured. The watch in June's shop suddenly felt like a small violation of that exile.
In the corner of the shop, a noticeboard had become a collage of local affairs: volunteer requests, a flyer for a pottery class, a printed photo of a black lab missing since July. Pinned to the center of the board was a small card Mara had not expected to find: Coastal Headland Adventures. The flyer was the color of a wet shell, and in block letters beneath a photograph of a clifflined horizon it read: Night Jump Meet — Storm Watch — Bring Hot Tea, Bring Lights. The local group's tone was equal parts dare and accountancy.
"You're thinking of jumping," June said without looking at Mara. Her gaze was fixed on the little flyer as if it had some personal history.
Mara stared at the card as if seeing it could provide a structural answer. "I'm not thinking of jumping."
June's fingers tapped the bench in a precise rhythm. "People who say that are the ones to watch. Not because they'll necessarily leap, but because they'll walk into a place where other leapers gather and decide whether they want to practice courage or pretend to."
"Practice courage," Mara repeated. The words tasted foreign and necessary. She had not said them aloud before. She wanted, absurdly, to feel the muscles that once trusted themselves test the small coordination again. The watch in her hand warmed with her skin.
"If you're going to do anything stupid," June said, without melodrama, "do it with eyes open. And do it with company. People who gather to test edges sometimes leave something behind on the rocks and sometimes they bring back more than they left with."
"You're very good at telling me what I am about to do," Mara said. She was smiling with an odd slant of gratitude. "Do you always run side commentary on people's life choices?"
June shrugged. "Someone's got to. Besides, it's easier to repair a clock than to repair decisions made without information." She pushed from her stool and went to the shelf, handing Mara a small thermos where the top had been fastened with a strip of duct tape. "Hot tea," she said. "Rules say bring heat. Also—" She reached into a drawer and pulled out a laminated card. The ink had been softened by handling. On it someone had written coordinates in an old, careful hand and a time: Friday, eight p.m., lighthouse.
Mara turned the card over and felt, for a beat, like she was reading blueprints of a plan that would have more than one exit. The watch in her pocket hummed faintly, like a throat clearing.
"Who runs their group at night?" she asked, almost to herself.
"A man who likes crowds," June said. "He calls himself Captain Hart. He used to be a diving instructor back when that meant taking reasonable risks. Now he organizes this to keep people from being alone with their worst thoughts. He calls it community. The sea calls it an audience. Sometimes there's overlap."
"Is it dangerous?" Mara asked again. She wanted to be careful not to romanticize the risk. She wanted to make a plan that could be measured.
"It's the coast," June said. "It's always dangerous. That's part of the point. If you're looking for certainty, you'll find it in paperwork. If you're looking to feel like a living thing again, it's messy." June's eyes were a kind of report. "You don't have to decide now."
Mara understood, to some small degree, that whatever she did next would be less about changing the past and more about tolerating the possibility of being present to something else. She had, over the last few weeks, folded her grief into practical things: bills, models, half-finished letters. She had not made a move that had no predictability. To go to the lighthouse felt like putting her pencil down and stepping into a blank sheet.
She left the shop with the thermos tucked under her arm and the card folded in her pocket. The bell chimed a small, private song for the departure. Outside, the air had a cut to it that made her cheeks ache. The town had that late-afternoon light that blurred the edges between work and rest. People moved in small practical arcs: the grocer sweeping, two teenagers with duffel bags, an elderly man carrying a stack of returned library books. In the ferry square a child ran with a kite that refused to fly straight, its tail a brightly stubborn rumor against the sky.
Her phone vibrated in her coat pocket. It was Leo. The message was a string of concern and circumspect humor: Coffee? He said he would come by with a thermos, and then, after a few minutes, sent a second message asking if she'd seen June's repair shop yet, adding an emoji that could be read as support or complete bewilderment.
Mara nearly turned back to reply to the certainty that was Leo—someone whose life measured itself in solid angles and the smell of sawdust. Instead, she put the phone away and let the decision sit between the seams of what she might do and what she might avoid. She walked toward the cliff not with the finality of the person who had come to end something, but with the strange, trembling curiosity of a person who had been handed by fate a whisper about many possible lives and wanted to know what the whisper sounded like when not alone.
That night, more out of a desire for quiet ritual than for society, Mara filled the small thermos with strong tea and put a flash light and the laminated card in her bag. She told herself she would go just to see what the lighthouse would show—not to expect miracles but to test the temperature of the world. It was a small, practical way back into motion.
Outside, the sea rehearsed a storm. The clouds thickened like folded plans. The watch tucked against her heart ticked, once, faint and sure. It did not promise to fix anything. It only promised to keep time.