On the morning the town clock stopped, Mara was halfway through counting the coins in her father's biscuit tin. She had promised to bring the money to the station before noon, but the familiar chime never came. Outside, the baker stood in his doorway with flour on his sleeve, looking up at the silent tower.

“Perhaps it has finally had enough of us,” he said.

Mara put the lid back on the tin. Her father had kept it beneath the kitchen sink for years, beside a broken watering can and a box of keys that opened nothing. After his death, she had expected to find savings. Instead, most of the coins were foreign, collected during journeys he had never mentioned.

At the bottom lay a paper ticket to a coastal town she had once begged to visit. The date was twenty years old. On its back, in her father's careful handwriting, were the words: Next summer, if we can.

She walked to the station anyway. A woman behind the counter examined the ticket and gently explained that it could no longer be used. Mara nodded, though she had known that before asking. Then she bought a new one with money from her own purse.

By the time the train arrived, the clock had begun striking again. She left the biscuit tin on the empty seat beside her and watched the town slip out of sight.