Guy put the timepiece to one side of the desk, his movements slow and careful. Catherine got up from the sofa, standing beside his chair. The tools for watch repair were spaced neatly across the desk’s polished surface. In her mind’s eye, she saw her desk at the print shop—type in compartments of the case, the handwritten notes, her composing stick. She asked, “What shall we do with it?”

“I’ll keep it here,” replied Guy. “If the police come asking for it, they can have it.” He turned toward her, and she remembered his exhaustion, sitting in the station’s lobby.

She said, “I know what you did at the print shop wasn’t easy.”

He reached for her hand, his expression open and honest. “No, I can’t say it was, but it was no simple task for you, either, Catherine. And we did it nevertheless.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THAT NIGHT, Catherine sat awake in the back room, looking over the timepiece in the dim lamplight. So many had searched for it, wished for it. All this time, the life it held had already been given back to the person it was taken from.

She placed the timepiece on the worktable and turned down the lamp even further, so there was only a wisp of light to guide her back to the sofa. She was unsure of what tomorrow would bring. With Spencer in police custody, the print shop would be short of a foreman. She’d return there and continue her work. She couldn’t linger forever in the watchmaker’s shop. She had to choose a path to take—just as she had when she’d left home.

Tugging the blankets up around her shoulders, she listened to the steady ticking of the shop clocks. She knew what she wanted. She saw it when she closed her eyes, clear as day: her small room above the print shop, the clatter of the presses, the smell of paper and ink. She let her eyes slip shut, wishing and hoping as she drifted off to sleep.

It was early in the morning when she was pulled awake to sounds beyond the closed door. Guy, she thought, arranging things in the shop, in preparation for the day. She dressed quickly and opened the door to find him dusting the clocks behind the counter. He turned, cloth in hand. His glasses slid down his nose, and he pushed them up, smiling as he did.

“Good morning, Catherine. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “Though you did wake me.”

Guy’s smile widened. He looked in good health compared to yesterday, his eyes clear behind his spectacles. “Owen is in the kitchen,” he said, setting down his cloth and coming around the side of the counter. “And there’s tea and toast for you on the table.”

Catherine made for the stairs, washed up with water from the ewer, returning back down when she heard a sharp knock at the door. Guy came out of the back room, his expression puzzled as he started across the shop to answer it.