alley and because Mara promised she could mend the curtains as part of the rent.
She was twenty, though Elias guessed younger until he saw her eyes. They were dark and direct, with that strange adult steadiness grief gives to people before their time. She worked at a dressmaker’s near the harbor, stitching beads onto evening gowns for women who would never know her name.
She sang while she worked.
Not loudly. Never to perform. She sang as some people breathe when walking uphill, quietly and because stopping would make the climb impossible.
The first night Elias heard her, he was bent over a pocket watch that refused to tick. The melody slipped through the floorboards, uncertain at first, then fuller, winding around him like warm thread.
His hand froze.
The watch in front of him stopped mattering.
The tune had no words he could understand. Perhaps it had none. It rose, turned back on itself, dropped into a minor phrase that made his chest tighten, then lifted at the last second as if refusing despair. Elias listened until the final note faded into the low groan of the building settling.
The next morning, he found himself tapping the rhythm into a strip of brown wrapping paper.
Mara caught him two nights later.
He was on the roof, where tenants hung laundry between chimneys and pretended not to look into one another’s loneliness. Elias had brought up a broken carriage clock and a stub of pencil. Mara emerged through the roof door with a chipped teacup and bare feet tucked into men’s slippers far too large for her.
“You are stealing my song,” she said.
Elias nearly dropped the clock.
“I am not stealing it. I am trying to understand it.”
She leaned over his shoulder before he could hide the paper. Her hair smelled faintly of soap and coal smoke.
“Those are not the same?”
“Not to a watchmaker.”
“Are you a watchmaker?”
He straightened. “An apprentice.”
“So, half a thief and half a watchmaker.”
He should have been offended. Instead, he laughed. The sound surprised him so much that Mara smiled.
That was how it began.
Not with declarations. Not with any romantic courage either of them would later pretend to have possessed. It began with stolen minutes after work, on a roof above an alley that smelled of bread and rainwater. Mara would hum a phrase. Elias would mark it down. She corrected him without mercy.
“No, that part falls. Like someone stepping off a curb and pretending they meant to.”
“Music cannot pretend.”
“Then you have not listened to enough women sing.”
He started calling her Mademoiselle Impossible.
She called him Monsieur Tick-Tock because he was always measuring things. Time. Distance. The cost of coal. The number of buttons missing from his only good shirt. The seconds between Henri’s footsteps and the workshop door opening.
“You live like someone is keeping score,” she told him once.
“Someone usually is.”
Mara looked at him then, not teasing.
“Then let them count this.”
She took a sugar cube from her pocket, stood at the roof’s edge, and dropped it into the alley. It struck a rain barrel below with a tiny, absurd plunk.
Elias stared at her.
“Why?”
“Because no one can use it now. Not the bakery.
