Walt looked.
It was his watch. There was no question about it. The photograph was close and cropped tight, the watch lying on what might have been dark cloth, the waves of the dial catching some hard light, the plain steel case, the brown strap. The resolution wasn't good but it didn't need to be. He had cut those waves himself. He'd know them from the moon.
"That's my watch," Walt said.
"Okay." Dombrowski's voice had dropped half a register into the flat, patient tone police officers use when they are deciding whether something is going to be difficult. "And where is it now?"
The young woman's arm was still out over the counter. She drew it back slowly against her chest, and her right hand closed over the watch.
Dombrowski's gaze followed her hand. He let out a breath through his nose.
"Ma'am," he said, "I'm going to need to see that."
"It's not stolen," Walt said. "Officer, I made that watch. In this shop. In 1979."
"Sir, I appreciate that, but what I've got right now is an item matching a reported stolen piece being sold over the counter in a secondhand shop. That's what I've got." Dombrowski looked at the white card on its little brass easel in the window, then back at Walt. "Where'd you acquire it?"
"I told you. I made it."
"Okay. You made it." He said it the way you'd repeat a child's explanation of a broken lamp. "You got paperwork on that?"
"I have my workbook from 1979 in the back. I have drawings. I have—"
"Sir. Do you have a receipt, a bill of sale, anything showing where this item came into your possession in the last month?"
"It didn't come into my possession in the last month. It's been in my possession for forty-seven years. It was in my dresser drawer until nineteen days ago." Walt heard his own voice starting to rise and made it stop. He laid both of his hands flat on the glass of the counter, the way his father used to when a customer was shouting, as if to say, this counter has been here longer than either of us and it will be here when we're done. "Officer. I understand you have a job to do. But you're making a mistake."
Dombrowski looked at Walt's hands on the counter. Old hands. Spotted on the backs. Steady.