The Things We Cherished Read Online Free Page B

was the only way she could bring herself to leave Marquan—to place him in the hands of someone better.
    “But Dolgenos handles white-collar crime. She won’t—”
    “And I want her well prepared,” Charlotte persisted. “Not just zooming in at the eleventh hour. She needs to meet my client first.”
    He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. “Fine.”
    Charlotte bit her lip uncertainly. She had asked for the moon, not expecting him to call her bluff and actually agree to her terms. Her thoughts turned to her caseload back at the office. “I can give you a week,” she said. In reality, she could get more. She hadn’t taken a vacation in almost two years, a fact that was a source of ribbing around the office. Despite their workload, her boss would give her the time willingly and her colleagues could cover anything thatcame up. But she needed to preserve an emergency escape, a way out in case working with Brian proved to be too much. And a week was all, maybe more than, he deserved.
    He exhaled, the relief visible on his face. “Great.” He waved the waitress over, signaling for the check. “Meet me at Newark Airport tomorrow night. The flight leaves at eight-fifteen.”
    She brushed aside her annoyance at his presumption that she would say yes, the fact that undoubtedly he had already booked the tickets. “Where are we going?” she asked as he handed a platinum credit card to the waitress without looking at the check.
    He pulled a business card from inside his jacket and handed it to her. “Germany. We need to go to Munich to talk to Dykmans’s attorneys.”
    “Fine.” She drained her drink and stood, leaving the pad thai almost untouched before her. “See you tomorrow,” she mumbled, then started for the door. She could not bear to be the one who remained behind, watching him leave again.

Two
    BAVARIA , 1903
    Johann had worked on the clock for nearly a year. Each night after Rebecca fell asleep beside him, breathing her shallow, even breaths that deepened and slowed as she dreamt, he crept from the house and returned to the small room at the back of the barn that served as his workshop. There he labored until the stub of candle he had taken from the kitchen was gone, or sometimes when the candle was a bit longer and more resilient, until the first starlings began to call to each other over the hills, signaling daybreak. Then he would return to the cottage and slip beneath the sheets, pressing himself against Rebecca’s warmth and wrapping his hands around the growing roundness of her belly for an hour before rising again to tend to the livestock.
    He had toiled all through the long bitter winter, his breath nearly freezing in the night air before him as he trudged to the barn through the hardened snow that covered the ground from October to April. As the spring rains came, turning the earth to a thick mud, he hastened his pace, trying to work longer, faster. The clock needed to be finished before planting season came and pulled him from his workshop for good.
    Then the previous evening, Johann suddenly tightened the finalscrew and knew that he was done. So he stowed the clock beneath the floorboards and returned to the house. He crawled into bed, trying not to disturb Rebecca, but she reached for him sleepily, urging him to make love to her in the gentle way he had learned since her stomach had grown.
    Afterward, as her body rose and fell beneath his embrace, he lay awake, envisioning his masterpiece. Set on a brass plate beneath a dome of thick lead glass, the clock was just twelve inches high. It had a hand-painted face, black numbers on ivory, which offered modest cover to the bare mechanism behind. Suspended below were four curved prongs, a rounded ball on the end of each. They rotated slowly 180 degrees to the right and then, seemingly moved by an invisible hand, stopped and spun slowly in the opposite direction. Every minute, the clock let out an obliging tick, an almost-sigh, as