Chapter 4

The back of the business card still carried a faded pencil note:

Mae Hollis — Hollis Clock Restoration Workshop.

I stepped onto the balcony and called the number.

Mae answered and asked, “Do your hands still listen to you?”

“Not today,” I said. “But I’ll teach them again.”

There were no openings at the workshop, she told me. And she wasn’t going to hand me real work because I had been good at it eight years ago.

Still, she agreed to let me come in three evenings a week and practice on the oldest movements in the shop.

At the…