The Watch That Waited

A pocket watch brings two hearts together across centuries.

About the story

Her grandmother said not to wind it. Curiosity was always going to win.

The pocket watch arrives with the estate paperwork: gold-cased, hallmarked London, 1859, and heavier than it looks. For an antiques historian, its unusual mechanism is a question begging to be answered. Her grandmother’s warning should have been enough to leave it alone.

Three days after the funeral, she turns the key. The light folds, her kitchen disappears, and the familiar certainty of knowing an object’s place in history gives way to an oil-lit study that should belong only to the past. A watch she was meant to inherit becomes a threshold she has no professional language to explain.

A time-travel Victorian romance about an extraordinary inheritance, a forbidden experiment, and the possibility of a connection beyond the century you call home.

Your kind of romance?

• Time travel into a Victorian setting
• An antiques historian
• A mysterious inherited pocket watch
• Romance across centuries

Read a short excerpt

From the opening pages

I wound it anyway. Three days after the funeral, alone in my flat at eleven at night with a glass of wine I didn’t finish, because I am an antiques historian and there is no force on earth stronger in me than the compulsion to know whether a mechanism still runs.

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