The next morning, I found a clock ticking in my desk drawer.
I hadn't opened that drawer in weeks. It was the sort of place filled with half-spent batteries, unpaired cufflinks, expired ID cards, and a boarding pass from a flight I don't remember taking. But there it was - a small brass clock, the kind you'd expect to see in a colonial officer's study, nestled between a dried fountain pen and a strip of iodine bandage.
It was ticking. Softly. Persistently.
But it had no hands.
I stared at it for a long time, trying to decide whether this was some half-clever prank my brain was playing. The face was spotless, pale ivory, with roman numerals so faint they almost seemed to be whispered onto the surface rather than printed. But where the hands should have been—nothing. Not broken or snapped off. Just… never there.
Still, it ticked. Tick. Tick. Tick. As if time itself had become an abstract ritual, divorced from measurement.
I placed it on my writing table. Something about the way it ticked made me feel calmer, more grounded, even as the logic of it defied me. I tried recording it with my phone. The ticking didn't come through. I tried timing it. One tick every two seconds. Then one every five. Then one every nothing. It wasn't following the rules. But it wasn't rebelling either. It was simply… remembering a rhythm I didn't yet know.
At 3:03 p.m. - twelve hours after the call that never spoke—the ticking stopped.
Not a gradual slowing. Not a wind-down.
Just... silence.
I held my breath. For a moment I felt like the room had lost pressure. My ears popped. The walls seemed to swell, as though the apartment were breathing again, but holding something in.
Then, from behind me, I heard a thud.
I turned.
A book had fallen from my shelf. One I had not touched in years. Essays on Temporal Anomalies in Vedic Cosmology. I didn't even remember buying it.
The spine cracked open on its own, and a single page folded slightly - marked by a brittle railway ticket from 2017. On the back of that ticket, someone had written in very fine pencil:"Time does not forget you. It only waits for silence."
The handwriting was mine.
But I had no memory of ever writing it.
And in that moment, the silence in the room began to hum again - low, electrical, like the beginning of a distant train arriving at an empty platform.
And somewhere inside that hum, I heard her voice again. This time, she was whispering something.
Something I couldn't yet understand.