Some truths keep time until someone is ready to hear them.
For fifty years, the Temple of Small Hours has measured Thornwick’s days. But now the clock is chiming late. The Temple’s priests call it decay. The patterns say otherwise. Deviations aren’t random—they’re a message, encoded in missed chimes and skipped minutes, leading to a forty-three-year-old fraud.
Someone is making the clock speak. When Maren traces the adjustments, she finds not a saboteur but a widow: Elowen Marsh, seventy-four and dying, using her last strength to tell her husband’s story. Jasper Marsh designed the masterpiece, but the council gave credit to a man with better connections.
The question is harder than the mystery: What does justice mean for wrongs half a century old? Bearing witness, Maren is learning, is its own kind of prayer.