In the city of Nuremberg in 1938, a man told his daughter a bedtime story. The man was a clockmaker, the son in a long line of clockmakers who lived in the city’s Jewish neighborhood. Keeping time as his ancestors had for two centuries.

“Time for bed, Lisavet. You’ve had enough stories for tonight,” the clockmaker said when his daughter asked him, for the third time that night, for another story.

Out the window, the streets had long since gone dark and chill with November winds. The clockmaker’s mind was on the work he had to finish downstairs in the shop. And more specifically on the letter from America that sat on his desk, delivered earlier that morning.

“I’m not tired,” Lisavet pouted. “I want to stay up until Klaus comes home.”

“Your brother won’t be home until late,” the clockmaker scolded.

The smile on his face foiled his attempts at discipline. He ran a hand through her hair, already knowing that she would wear him down. His daughter was his late wife reborn, with golden hair and caramel brown eyes.

When she was alive, his wife had often teased that they had replicated themselves into two miniature versions, him in their son and her in their daughter. It was true in the physical sense but beyond that, Ezekiel Levy and his son, Klaus, could not be more different. Klaus was like his mother with his high society taste and dreams of attending school in the capital. It was Lisavet who was most like Ezekiel. She could often be found perched on the stool beside him in his workshop, watching him coax the gears and springs of old broken watches until they shuddered back into life. She was the one who wound the clocks in the front of the shop each morning, watching with quiet reverence as the wood and metal masterpieces sang to the tune of time. And she was the one who would one day inherit his shop and the family secrets that came with it.