The Repeated Hour

On the night the clocks went back, Clara stayed up to live the same hour twice. At three o'clock sharp, the living-room clock returned to two, obedient.

The second time, the coffee tasted the same and the street was still empty. Only the cat noticed something: it climbed off the sofa and sat facing the hallway, very still, like someone giving up their seat.

At twenty past two — the second time — footsteps sounded in the flat upstairs, the one that had stood empty for months. They weren't moving-day footsteps: they were the footsteps of someone who knows the house in the dark. They crossed the ceiling slowly, stopped where she knew there was a window, and didn't move again until three.

When the repeated hour ran out, the cat returned to the sofa and the ceiling fell silent.

Clara understood it as she switched off the light: the hour we give back every October isn't destroyed. It is given to someone. And upstairs, someone had spent all of it looking out of a window.