The watch changed nothing about the facts, in a sense; a running watch on a dead man’s wrist proves nothing about whether he is alive.

But it did something more important than prove anything.

It reopened the question.

For an entire day, I had lived inside the closed certainty of my husband’s death, a certainty so total that I had not examined a single element of it.

And then I noticed a ticking watch that should not have been there, on a body that should have been prepared and was not, and in that small wrongness, the sealed question of Mark’s death cracked open just wide enough for me to look inside it again.

That is all it took.