Anniversary

He gave her a wristwatch on their wedding day. It lost exactly one minute every day.

"It is faulty," she protested.

"It is deliberate," he smiled. "So that we are always late together, everywhere."

For forty years she wore it, correcting it by hand every morning, telling him off in jest about that silly present.

He died on a Tuesday in October.

That night, undone, she sat down to look at the watch and remember him. And she counted. One minute a day, forty years. She added up the minutes, the hours, the days stolen from punctuality.

Exactly the time the doctors had given him at birth, with that heart that should not have lasted past childhood.

The watch was not losing time. It was counting back the time he had been lent. And that night, for the first time in forty years, it showed the right hour.