Atonement

Lena, brave and furious, marched into the clock shop. The air smelled of brass and old sorrow. Elias, now eighty-two, looked up from a disassembled cuckoo clock. His hands were bone and tremor.

“Is it true?” she asked.

When he finished, he asked Lena—now fifteen—to be the one to wind it for the first time. She hesitated. Then she placed her hand on the brass key. Atonement