Someone presses a watch into my palm as the train lurches away.

“You lose this yesterday, sixteen hours from now,” he says.

I know the line by heart. I mouth it with him, the way you mouth a prayer you stopped believing in a long time ago. By the time I look up, he’s gone into the next car. The metal in my hand is heavier than it should be, warm from his skin. Warmer than skin should be.

It is my watch.

I haven’t seen it in four months. The crystal is crazed with cracks from the morning it hit the platform floor, but behind the fractures the second hand is moving. I stopped this watch. I know I stopped this watch. I pulled the crown myself and felt the tick die under my thumb before I buried it in a shoebox at the back of the closet, under the program from the funeral, under the shoes she’ll never grow into.

The second hand moves anyway.

I wore this watch when I stood waiting on the platform. Late again, always late, and she was pulling at my hand because she wanted to see whether the train had a face. I’d told her once that all trains did, and she’d believed me with her whole weight leaning forward. I checked the time. Just one minute, just to see how late. And the screech came. The horn. The guard’s voice, already too high. Then a gap in the sound where something should have been, and the crowd surging forward, and my hand holding nothing.

I move through the carriage, braced against the sway, searching for him, ready to beg. Take it back. Whatever this is, undo it. No one looks at me. Commuters folded into themselves, into screens and paperbacks, and every one of them is reading the same page. I’m almost sure of it. The same page, unturned. A woman by the window blinks, but only when I blink. I stop watching her.

In the next car there’s no sign of him. When I ask the conductor if he saw a tall man in a navy coat, he says, “Half the train, love,” and clips my ticket. His punch leaves no hole. He moves on.

Back in my seat I turn the words over. Yesterday, sixteen hours from now.

I leave the watch on the seat. When I reach the lavatory I feel it in my coat pocket, ticking against my hip. I drop it in the bin. I wash my hands and look up and it is lying on the edge of the sink, vibrating faintly against the porcelain. I set it on the cold metal rail by the door and walk the length of two cars before I feel its weight again, in my closed fist this time, my fingers already wrapped around it as though I’d been holding it for hours. The crystal is warm. The tick has found my pulse and matched it.

The train carries me past my stop. I close my fingers until the case cuts a crescent into my palm and wait.

I have been here before. I will be here again. The lurch. The shout. The platform rising into view.

The man in the navy coat steps from the next car. He reaches for my hand. His fingers are cold where the watch was warm. He is smiling the way people smile at funerals: with the mouth only, the eyes doing something else entirely.

“This is your stop,” he says.

The doors open. The platform is right there, ordinary, rain-stained, full of people going home. I could step through them and keep walking. I could climb the stairs, unlock my door, open the closet. I could learn to sleep without listening for her breathing down the hall. I could stop setting out two bowls in the morning.

I could let the watch stay broken.

The doors close.

He nods, as though I have answered.

I close his fingers around it.

The crescent in my palm is already a scar.

“You lose this yesterday,” he says, “sixteen hours from now.”

The train lurches away.

I know the line by heart.