Read Chapter 37: The Timetable of Life

The apartment smelled of coffee and old paper, the way it always did when she'd been home long enough to forget the rhythm of the train. Camille kicked off her boots by the door and set her bag on the kitchen counter. The pocket watch was warm against her wrist, ticking with a gentle, steady pulse that had become as familiar as her own heartbeat.

She stood still for a moment, listening to the quiet. No rumble of wheels beneath her feet. No corridor announcements. No ghost.

Just the hum of the refrigerator and the distant cry of a gull over the rooftops of Nice.

Her grandfather's words from the viaduct still echoed in her chest. *The crack is spreading faster than we thought. But the watch isn't a key, Camille. It never was. It's a meter—it measures the distance between what we owe and what we've paid. And you've paid it all.*

He'd shown her the fissure running like a dark vein through the old stone, wider than her hand now, and she'd felt the watch on her wrist tick a little slower. A little calmer. As if it, too, had heard the news.

Now, in her own kitchen, she opened the drawer beside the stove—the one where she kept spare batteries and a half-used tube of hand cream and the corkscrew that never seemed to find its way back to the wine rack. She unbuckled the strap of the watch and held it in her palm for a long moment.

*Keep time with the living,* the note had said.

She set it in the drawer. Closed it.

Then she opened the drawer again, because that felt too final, too much like an ending. She looked at the watch lying there, face up, the minute hand moving in its patient circle. Not a goodbye. Just a resting place.

She closed the drawer and went to the window.

The late afternoon sun threw long shadows across the tracks below her building. A regional train sat at the platform, doors open, a few passengers boarding with slow, unhurried steps. She watched them—a woman with a shopping bag, an old man with a cane, a young couple arguing softly about something they'd both already forgotten. Ordinary people on ordinary journeys.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. She crossed the room and picked it up.

*Étienne: Are you still in Nice? I'm at the archival reading room tomorrow. They just uncrated a 1938 SNCF tender document with your grandfather's signature on it. Thought you might want to see it. Coffee after?*

She read the message twice. The first time, she saw the invitation. The second time, she saw the care in it—the way he'd found a reason, a thread of history to pull her back into the world of the living.

Her thumb hovered over the screen.

*Camille: I'm here. Coffee sounds good. But only if you let me buy the pastries.*

His reply came within seconds.

*Étienne: Deal. Tomorrow, 14h, the Café des Fleurs. I'll bring the documents. You bring your appetite.*

She smiled. It was a small thing, a cup of coffee and a plate of pastries, but it was a beginning. Not a new story—she wasn't ready for that, might never be ready for that in the way she'd loved Julian—but a continuation. A life that kept ticking forward, minute by minute, whether she willed it or not.

She put the phone down and turned back to the window.

The regional train had departed, leaving the platform empty and still. Beyond the tracks, the rooftops of Nice rolled toward the sea, and beyond that, the sky was beginning to bruise with the first colors of dusk. She thought about the viaduct, standing in the fading light, its crack held steady for now by the weight of a promise finally fulfilled. The committee had voted to commission a memorial plaque. Her grandfather had been asked to speak at the unveiling.

She'd been asked too.

*For the families,* the letter had said. *For the memory.*

She hadn't answered yet.

From her pocket, she pulled the white rose. It was impossibly fresh still, the petals cool and smooth, no brown edges, no wilting. She'd kept it in a glass of water on her nightstand for a week before realizing it didn't need water. It didn't need anything. It simply was—a piece of something that had crossed over and left a trace behind.

She lifted it to her nose. No scent. Not even a ghost of one.

But it was real. She could feel the weight of it, the coolness of the stem. Whatever Julian had become, whatever he'd walked through when he'd passed through her that final time, he'd left this behind on purpose. A marker. A sign that the love they'd shared wasn't a hallucination or a fever dream or a story she'd told herself to survive the long nights on the train.

It had happened.

It was over.

And she was still here.

A knock at the door made her turn. She crossed the apartment and opened it to find Marie-Claire standing in the hallway, holding a small paper bag.

"I brought you fougasse," the older woman said. "You looked thin at the viaduct. And I don't trust young men who only invite you for coffee to feed you properly."

Camille laughed—a real laugh, surprising herself. "Étienne isn't—"

"I know who Étienne is." Marie-Claire's eyes glinted with something Camille couldn't quite read. "I knew his grandmother. She used to work the night shift at the Nice depot, back in the fifties. Told stories about trains that ran on time and ghosts that didn't." She pressed the bag into Camille's hands. "Some people see more than others. He's one of them."

So that was it. The perceptiveness. The way Étienne had looked at her in the library, as if he could see the weight she carried without being told where it came from.

Camille held the door wider. "Will you stay for coffee?"

"For a moment." Marie-Claire stepped inside, glancing around the small apartment with an appraising eye. "You keep it clean. Good. A cluttered home means a cluttered mind, and you've had enough clutter these past months."

They sat at the small table by the window, the fougasse open between them, steam rising from two cups of coffee. Marie-Claire didn't ask about Julian, and Camille didn't offer. Some conversations didn't need to be spoken. The watch in the drawer, the rose on the counter, the scar on the viaduct's stone—they all said what needed saying.

"You'll go to the memorial?" Marie-Claire asked eventually, breaking off a piece of bread.

"I don't know yet."

"You should. Not for them." She gestured vaguely toward the city. "For yourself. A funeral is for the living, and you never got to have one. All that grief without a grave to visit." She took a sip of coffee. "The past deserves a marker. Otherwise it just bleeds into the present and stains everything it touches."

Camille thought about the drawer. The watch ticking patiently in the dark. She thought about Julian's face as he'd faded, peaceful at last, the way he'd smiled when she'd finally understood what the watch was really for.

"I think I can stand in front of a plaque," she said. "I think I can say a few words."

Marie-Claire nodded, satisfied. "Good. Now eat. You're too thin, and that historian friend of yours will think I don't feed you."

They talked for another hour—about the bakery Marie-Claire's grandson had opened in Marseille, about the new high-speed line they were testing through the Alps, about nothing in particular and everything that mattered. When Marie-Claire finally stood to leave, she paused at the door.

"You'll be all right," she said. It wasn't a question.

"I know." Camille said it and meant it. "Thank you. For everything."

Marie-Claire waved a hand. "I sent a ring into the afterlife for a boy I never met. The least you can do is send me a postcard when you're famous." She winked and was gone.

Camille closed the door and leaned against it, listening to the older woman's footsteps fade down the hall. The apartment felt different now. Not empty—she'd stopped thinking of it that way—but open. Ready.

She walked to the window again. Night had fallen while they talked, and the tracks below were dark ribbons of steel, catching the glow of the platform lights. A night train was pulling in, its headlights sweeping across the platform in a slow arc. Passengers waited in small clusters, silhouetted against the windows of the cars.

She watched them board. She watched the doors close. She watched the train slide out of the station, gaining speed, its lights shrinking until they were just points in the distance, then gone.

Her phone buzzed. Étienne again.

*Étienne: Bring the watch. The tender document is dated three days after the crash. There's something in the margins I want to show you.*

She looked toward the drawer. The watch ticked in the dark, keeping time with the living.

*Camille: I'll bring it.*

She put down the phone and pulled the white rose from her pocket one last time. The petals were cool under her fingers, impossibly smooth, impossibly fresh. She crossed to the kitchen, opened the drawer, and laid the rose beside the watch.

Not a burial. A resting place.

She closed the drawer.

Outside, the sky had cleared, and a single star streaked across the darkness above the tracks—bright, brief, gone before she could make a wish. But she didn't need to wish for anything. She had coffee plans and a memorial speech to write, a grandfather who loved her and a woman who'd sent her bread and an historian who saw too much and asked the right questions.

She had a drawer with a watch in it, ticking softly, and a rose that would never wilt.

She had time.

And for the first time in her life, Camille Laurent was not haunted by it. She simply opened the window, let the night air in, and stood there breathing—one minute at a time, just like everyone else.