He had not said anything. He had looked at it on the floor for a long time. Then he had said, very carefully, "I'll fix it," and she had said, "I know you will," and that night, after she put him to bed, she had looked up watch repair on her phone and found Melamed's, and she had called on Monday and a man with a voice like a door creaking had said bring it in, and she had brought it in on a Sunday in early September, and he had said six weeks, because of the part, because nobody made the part anymore, because he would have to make it himself. And every day for six weeks, every single morning when she brought him his coffee and his pills and his oatmeal with the brown sugar he was not supposed to have, Dermot Sheehan had asked her, "Watch?" And she had said, "Soon." And today it was soon. Today it was in her lap.
He would wind it himself the first time, she thought. She would hold it and he would turn the crown with his left hand, slow, and she would count. She would let him lose count and not correct him.
The train slowed. The conductor's voice came over the speaker, Mr. Gerrity's voice, flattened and crackling: "Bedford Hills. Bedford Hills. Next stop Katonah." It was the same voice he used every Sunday. He said Katonah the way her grandmother used to say amen.
At Katonah the boy got off without looking at her. She watched him through the window walk down the platform under the lights toward the parking lot, his phone pressed to his ear now, his shoulders up around his neck, and a car's headlights came on at the far end of the lot and flashed twice, and he began to run.
That was good. Somebody had come.
Then it was only Solange and the box and the motors. Wickham Falls was the next stop. It was a small station, a single low platform and a brick depot from 1910 that was now a coffee place selling six-dollar cortados to men in fleece vests, and a parking lot that on a weekday was full of Audis and long gray Teslas and on a Sunday night held nothing. There was a single cab company in town, Wickham Car Service, which the agency had an account with, and which picked her up every Sunday at the 12:21 and drove her the two miles up the hill to Quarry Lane in a black Lincoln that smelled of pine tree air freshener and the cigarettes the driver, Mr. Paredes, was not supposed to smoke in it.
Mr. Paredes had not texted. Usually he texted at Mount Kisco, a thumbs-up, nothing more. She turned her phone back on. Four percent. No message. She called the car service number and it rang six times and went to a recording, a woman's voice, cool and pleasant, telling her that Wickham Car Service's hours were six a.m. to midnight Sunday through Thursday, and to please call back during business hours, and to have a wonderful evening.
She looked at the time on the phone. 12:17.
She thought: he forgot, or he is sick, or somebody somewhere changed something in a computer. It almost never mattered which. The result was the same. You were on a platform at midnight and no one was coming.
The train came around the long curve where the river ran beside the tracks and she saw the lights of the Bedford Road crossing come up red and blinking ahead, and she heard the horn, two longs, a short, a long, rolling out across the dark valley, up the ridge, through the gap in the trees, up the hill to Quarry Lane and in at the window of the front room where an old man was sitting in a brown leather chair with the television on mute, waiting for exactly that sound.