She has her coat buttoned to the throat, one hand already finding the doorknob, and he's still talking — he's been talking for most of an hour, about nothing much, keeping the sentence going so the doorway stays a doorway and not yet a goodbye.
"I should go," she says. Not the first time tonight. "You said that at one," he says, without moving out of the way. "That's your fault." "I'll take it."
Over his shoulder the kitchen clock reads 1:58, the old wind-up one his grandfather left him — no battery, no memory, nothing in it that fixes itself. She's been watching the minute hand climb for ten minutes the way you watch a pot you don't actually want to boil.
"Clocks go back tonight," he says, catching her looking. "I should deal with that before I forget." He says it like an excuse, because it is one, and they both let it be one.
He drags a chair to the wall and climbs up in his socks, reaching for the hands with two fingers, careful, the way you handle something that might startle. "Hold this," he says, meaning the chair. She puts both hands on him instead, flat at his hips, steadying nothing — the chair isn't going anywhere — and he doesn't correct her.
He walks the minute hand backward, click by click, past two, past one-thirty, past one-fifteen, and nothing in the room changes except the number.
He steps down. The clock says one o'clock again. "There," he says. "We get this one twice."
She looks at the door. Then at the coat she's still wearing. Then she starts on the buttons, top one first, slow, like she's testing whether the rule really does apply to her — whether an hour handed back belongs to both of them, or just to him.
The clock ticks on toward two, unhurried, nobody timing it this time, and by the time it matters again, neither of them is watching.