"Why are you selling it?" she asked, and then straightened and flushed. "Sorry. That's none of my business."
"It's a fair question." Walt took the watch back and turned it over in his fingers. The caseback was plain, brushed steel, no engraving. He had never engraved the back. What he'd written, he'd written where only a watchmaker would ever look. "My wife used to say a watch in a drawer is a dead watch. I wore this every day from the year I made it until the day she died. Then I took it off and put it in a drawer, and I've been walking past that drawer for three years." He set it down on the chamois. "She'd have hit me with a newspaper by now."
The young woman laughed, then stopped laughing, then looked at him with something careful in her face.
"It's for my dad," she said. "His seventieth is in two weeks. He used to have a shop too. Fells Point. Guitars, mostly. Repairs, some sales, lessons in the back room. He always said the only people who understood him were people who fixed small things for a living." She swallowed. "He closed it two years ago. He hasn't really been the same. And he used to bring me up here when I was a kid, before he ever had his own place, just to look at your window. He'd say, 'Nadia, that man is the last honest watchmaker in Baltimore.'"
Walt raised his eyebrows. "He said that?"
"Every time."
"He was exaggerating. There's one in Towson."
She laughed again, and this time it stuck.
"What's your father's name?"
"Gus. Gus Brandt."
Walt thought. Behind him a cuckoo clock on the east wall, which had been running seven minutes fast since August, opened its little door and said what it had to say and shut it again. "Brandt's Strings," he said finally. "On Thames Street. Green door."
Her eyes went bright. "You knew it."
"I bought a mandolin string there once for a man who'd hung his mandolin on my wall to pay for a clock. Long story. Your father didn't charge me. He said a man who'd take a mandolin in trade deserved a free string." Walt shook his head slowly. "Seventy. My God."
She'd brought a cashier's check made out to Szabo & Son, already filled in, folded once inside a library book. He looked at it and then at her.
"You were sure," he said.