“Do you think it watches us?” he asked, his voice like a thread stretched thin. The dim light of the café lamp hung low above Aleksandr’s head, illuminating a face carved with worry and age, though he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. His new watch, sleek but oddly inconspicuous, gleamed faintly on the crook of his wrist as his hand swirled the glass of wine before him.

“No,” replied Vera tersely. Her fingers played with a cigarette she never lit, her dark eyes narrowing. “It’s just a watch, Sasha.” She rarely called him that—Sasha. It was always “Aleksandr,” with the precision of someone trying to remind him of his grounded existence. But tonight, perhaps because of the dense silence hanging over them, she let that barrier slip.

Aleksandr smiled, but it was an unnerving, hollow thing. “Just a watch?” He leaned closer, his voice dropping into the conspiratorial depths only cheap wine inspires. “Do you know what the salesman told me when I bought it? He said, ‘This is no ordinary timekeeper. This watch carries history.’”

Vera raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. The air between them felt sodden, heavy with some unspoken weight. Outside, the rain drummed faintly against the window, echoing the erratic rhythm of Aleksandr’s thoughts.

“History,” he continued, his voice trembling but ferocious. “That salesman said the watch was once worn by an officer in Stalin’s camp. ‘A gift for loyalty,’ the man told me. It was handed down, through decades—hands bloodied by war, betrayal, and judgment.”

Vera finally broke her silence. Her voice maintained its usual detachment, but there was an edge to it, a crack in her well-practiced apathy. “So now what? You’re haunted by a trinket?”

“I’m haunted,” Aleksandr whispered, gripping the watch tightly, the steel biting into his palm. “But not by the watch. It’s me. My choices.” He paused, letting his words hover in the air like ghosts. Then, leaning back, he laughed—a sharp, self-lacerating sound. “Oh, you should hear yourself, Vera. ‘Sasha is haunted by antiques!’ What would the magistrate think if I tried that defense?”

Vera’s lips tightened into a thin line. She set the cigarette down, untouched, and locked her gaze with his. “You kept the books, Sasha,” she said coldly. “You signed the orders. You bought the false papers for your little factory. You won’t pretend you didn’t know. Or”—she tilted her head, a mocking gesture—“is it the watch’s history you’re trying to wear, because you can’t face your own?”

Aleksandr reeled back as if struck. His breath caught, a choking gasp escaping his throat. “You don’t understand,” he murmured. “I did it to survive. For us. To protect you." The words hung in the tiny café, fragile and flammable as the matches Vera refused to strike.

Silence stretched between them, fractured only by the tapping of his fingers against the table. Of course, she didn’t believe him. How could she? Even he didn’t entirely believe it anymore. When the “opportunity” had come—serendipity painted in shades of compromise and greed—he’d reached for it. And piece by piece, transaction by transaction, he’d buried his conscience under ledgers inked in complicity.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Vera said at last, breaking the silence with a calmness that chilled him more than her anger ever could. “They’ll come for you. Whether you sit here brooding over that cursed watch or not, they’ll come.”

Aleksandr’s lips twitched, curling toward a grim smirk. “And you? Will you stand by me? Or will you testify?” His voice bit at her, seeking some spark of human anger, some acknowledgment that she still cared.

But Vera, ever the pragmatist, didn’t bite. Picking up her coat, she left a lingering pause, then murmured with frightening indifference, “It’s not my path to decide, Sasha. Yours was enough for both of us.”

As the door swung shut, Aleksandr felt the full weight of his isolation, each tick of the watch a hammer pounding the nails into his own coffin. The rain outside intensified, drowning the world in its rhythmic assault. He toyed with the watch, his fingers brushing its face as if expecting it to glow, to speak, to absolve him.

But it was only a timekeeper, after all—a vessel of history, yes, but not his executioner. That truth, bitter and sharp, sat firmly at Aleksandr’s chest.

He knew the end was his to write, though he had long since lost the pen.