The lid opened with a soft click.
Inside the worn velvet box lay my father’s watch.
For several seconds, I could not breathe.
The gold case was scratched near the winding crown, exactly where I had dropped it against a radiator when I was seventeen.
The brown leather strap had been replaced, but the face, the hands, and the small dent along the rim were unmistakable.
I reached toward it, then stopped before my fingers touched the glass.
“No,” I said.
“That can’t be his watch.”
Hazel’s eyes filled with tears.
“It is.”
I looked from her to Iris, waiting for one of them to laugh, to admit they had found a replica, or to explain that this was some carefully chosen replacement.
Neither did.
I lifted the watch from the box and turned it over.
The engraving on the back was faint from years of wear, but I could still read it.
To Daniel.
Keep your promises.
Dad.
My chair scraped backward across the kitchen floor.
I had not heard anyone call me Daniel in years.
To Hazel and Iris, I was Dad.
At work, I was Mr.
Mercer.
At hospitals, I was the exhausted man signing forms beneath fluorescent lights.
But my father had called me Daniel when he placed that watch in my palm on my twenty-first birthday.
He had died four years before the accident.
The watch was the last piece of him I had owned.
I had sold it two years after the crash, on a Thursday afternoon when an insurance representative informed me that Iris’s new brace was not considered medically essential.
The brace cost more than I earned in a month.
The pawnshop owner offered me a fraction of the watch’s value.
I accepted without bargaining because the clinic needed payment by Friday.
That evening, I returned home carrying the brace beneath my arm.
When Hazel noticed the empty place on my wrist, I told her the watch had stopped working.
“I sent it away to be repaired,” I had said.
I remembered how seriously she nodded.
Now Hazel lowered her gaze.
“We knew it wasn’t being repaired.”
The words struck me harder than I expected.
“What?”
Iris pulled a thick envelope from beneath the table.
“We heard you that night.”
I stared at them.
Hazel explained that they had woken when I came home late.
They had heard me in the kitchen speaking to their therapist on the phone.
I had been trying to sound calm while explaining that I had sold the watch to cover the brace and part of Hazel’s next treatment cycle.
I had thought the girls were asleep down the hall.
They had been listening from the doorway.
“We saw you sitting at the table after the call,” Iris said.
“You kept rubbing the place where the watch used to be.”
I remembered that night too clearly.
The kitchen had been dark except for the light over the stove.
I had placed both hands over my face because I was ashamed of how much the loss hurt.
It was only a watch, I had told myself.
My daughters needed me.
Objects did not matter.
But grief did not care about logic.
Selling the watch had felt like losing my father a second time.
