In a house that doesn’t count time, sometimes someone still waits for the moment you remember how to arrive.

  The name on the library card was mine, but not in my handwriting.

  Clara Bell, in looping ink, tucked into a forgotten copy of The Secret Garden. I found it wedged behind the reference desk, dusty and out of circulation, as though it had been placed there quietly by someone who knew I’d come looking. Except I hadn’t. Not really.

  I turned the card over, curious. In finer script, smaller and darker, it read: Back stairwell. After closing.

  So I went.

  The stairwell was old—the kind of narrow, spiraling thing that always smells like old wood and rain. I half expected to find a storage closet or, at best, a locked service door. But halfway down, the light changed.

  Not brighter. Not darker. Just... softer.

  At the bottom was a glass-paneled door that hadn’t been there before.

  And through it: a room of clocks.

  The space felt vast, but not tall. Like a pocket of the world folded inward, lined in velvet and ticking. Grandfather clocks, brass carriage clocks, small porcelain ones shaped like owls and moons and sunflowers. Not one of them was set to the same time. Some ticked; others waited. The air was warm and faintly scented—like cedar, orange peel, and something I couldn’t name. Something like memory, if memory had a smell.

  In the center stood a man, tall and slightly bent forward, sleeves rolled to the forearms, one hand hovering above a small silver pocket watch laid open on a velvet cloth. He didn’t startle when I entered. He didn’t speak right away.

  He just looked up—and smiled like I’d arrived exactly on time.

  “Been a while since someone walked in,” he said, as if we were old acquaintances and I was simply late to our appointment.

  He had light brown hair, slightly wavy, tucked messily behind his ears. His face was sharp in a thoughtful way, not unkind. There was a delicateness in how he moved—like someone used to mending things smaller than words.

  I gave a half-smile, unsure why my heart felt like it was remembering something ahead of me. “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “Neither was I.” He gestured to a chair across the wide table. “But you’re here. So it must be the hour for visitors.”

  I sat. The chair sighed under me, wood warm from sun that didn’t reach this far underground.

  He turned back to the pocket watch, adjusted the tiny hands with an instrument like a painter’s brush.

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  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “A waiting room,” he said. “For time that didn’t finish what it started.”

  The watch clicked shut. He set it beside a small brass bell. The silence afterward hummed.

  “You’re… fixing clocks?”

  “In a way,” he said. “I try to catch the ones that stopped while someone was still listening.”

  I watched him move with quiet precision. Each motion meant. Each pause patient.

  Something tugged at me then—not panic, not fear. Just a quiet ache. Like I’d almost remembered something too far away to reach.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  His hands stilled. His eyes found mine. “Not yet.”

  “But maybe once?” I offered.

  He didn’t nod, didn’t speak.

  But the air between us changed. Slowed. Warmed.

  He passed me a cup of tea—where it had come from, I didn’t know. The steam spiraled gently.

  “I had a dream once,” I said, not knowing why I said it. “Of a hallway made of clocks and a boy who said he remembered my laugh before he heard it.”

  He blinked. “What happened?”

  “I woke up. I was thirteen. It stayed with me.”

  His smile returned, soft and distant. “Some dreams don’t end. They just pause.”

  There was something else on the table now. A paper slip, cream-colored, folded in half. My name again—Clara Bell—written this time in my own hand.

  I reached for it. The ink shimmered faintly. Inside, just two lines:

  You left when the time was wrong.

  But I kept the hour open, just in case.

  My throat caught.

  I looked at him.

  “You wrote this?”

  “I held it,” he said. “Until someone came to remember it.”

  The room began to blur at the edges—subtly, like fog beginning to erase outlines.

  The ticking slowed.

  “It’s almost time,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For the waking part,” he said. “But you get to take something back.”

  He handed me the folded paper. The ink had dried.

  I stood, reluctant.

  “Will I ever see you again?”

  “If the moment returns,” he said, rising too. “Or if you write a new one.”

  He reached out—not forward, but palm up, between us. I pressed the letter into his hand.

  He closed his fingers around it.

  And then, gently, he reached out again and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

  “You always leave a little early,” he whispered. “But you never forget the door.”

  I blinked.

  The stairwell was behind me, dark and full of dust.

  In my hand: the paper slip. The ink faint, but real.

  And in my chest, the steady tick of something I hadn’t felt in years.

  A promise that waited.