Not the ants. Not God. A completely wasted sugar cube. We are still alive.”
The next night, he brought two.
By summer, their friendship had become the kind of secret everyone almost sees and no one can prove. A pause too long on the stairs. A second cup of coffee left outside a door. A scrap of blue thread wound around a watch key. A whistle, three notes descending, answered from another window.
Elias did not say he loved her.
He thought love was a word for people who owned furniture.
But he wrote her song on every kind of paper he could find. Bakery wrappers. Old invoices. The blank backs of pawn tickets. He carried one copy folded inside his shirt, close to his chest, and pretended it was because he feared losing the melody.
Mara understood before he did.
One evening, after rain had trapped them under the roof’s little awning, she reached over and smoothed a damp curl from his forehead. Elias stopped breathing.
“You look frightened,” she said softly.
“I am thinking.”
“That is what frightened people call it.”
He looked at her mouth, then away, then back again.
Mara did not move closer. She did something kinder. She waited.
So Elias chose, for once, not to measure the danger.
He kissed her.
The kiss was brief because thunder cracked so violently above them that they both jumped apart, then laughed into each other’s shoulders until the storm covered the sound.
For six weeks, Elias was happy in a way that made him careless.
Carelessness, Henri had warned, was never forgiven.
The old watchmaker found the music in September.
Elias had hidden the pages inside a drawer beneath cracked enamel dials, a foolish place because Henri opened every drawer in his shop at least once a day, often for no reason except suspicion. Elias came down from delivering a repaired clock to find his master standing at the bench with the brown papers spread in front of him.
Henri did not shout.
If he had shouted, Elias might have become angry enough to defend himself well.
Instead, Henri looked tired.
“Who is she?”
Elias said nothing.
Henri lifted one page. “Do not insult me. A boy does not write the same song forty times unless there is a girl breathing inside it.”
Elias reached for the papers.
Henri moved them away.
“Her name.”
“No.”
The refusal came before Elias thought to be afraid of it.
Henri’s eyes sharpened. “No?”
Elias swallowed. “She has done nothing wrong.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“Then ask something decent.”
The slap was not hard, but it was shocking. Henri seemed as startled by it as Elias. For a moment neither moved. Outside, a cart rolled over the stones. Somewhere below, Madame Fournier cursed at a customer.
Henri lowered his hand.
“You have an interview letter from Paris,” he said.
Elias’s anger faltered.
Henri walked to the cupboard, unlocked the top drawer, and removed an envelope sealed in red wax. Elias recognized the crest immediately. The Paris Guild of Horologists. He had heard Henri speak of it only twice, and both times as if naming a cathedral.
“I wrote to men who owe me favors,” Henri said. “I sent your drawings. Your regulator design. Your escapement sketches. They will take
