Chapter 5: The Broken Clock
The days began to fold into each other like pages in a worn book. There were no calendars in the monastery, no clocks save the sun. Time moved by the position of shadows and the way the light softened in the afternoons. Elias lost track of how long he had been there. Two days? Five? A week? He no longer counted. Genevieve did not ask. Each morning began with silence. Not emptiness, but a deliberate quiet, like the world was breathing slowly before opening its mouth. They drank tea, harvested herbs from the garden, mended torn fabric, rebuilt stone walls where the cliff winds had damaged them. Genevieve had a rhythm to her life, a kind of private music that Elias slowly began to hear. He was beginning to heal, though he hadn't known he was wounded. One morning, Elias found her standing near a shattered sundial in the overgrown courtyard. She was barefoot, her hands clasped behind her back, staring down at it like a puzzle she couldn't solve. "It never worked properly," she said when he approached. "Even when it was whole. This place is strange like that. Time behaves differently here." He knelt beside it. "Do you want me to fix it?" "No," she said. "Some things should stay broken." They walked the cliffs later that day, following an old shepherd's trail that looped through crumbling terraces and wild fig trees. The sea was calm below, but the sky was thick with clouds, the light filtered as though through gauze. The air was warm, heavy with the scent of thyme and stone. Elias stopped near a cliff's edge where a tree had grown crooked over the drop. It was split at the base, as if lightning had once kissed it, but it still bloomed green. "That tree reminds me of you," he said. Genevieve arched an eyebrow. "Scarred and stubborn?" "Alive. And still reaching for the sky." She smiled softly, brushing a strand of windblown hair behind her ear. "I wasn't always like this," she said. "I used to hate silence. I filled my life with noise. Parties, music, constant motion. The stillness terrified me. It felt like death." "And now?" "Now it feels like truth." They continued walking until the path narrowed to a ribbon between two sharp outcrops. Below them, the sea carved at the cliffs in slow, patient strikes. "I need to show you something," she said suddenly. They turned inland, through a dense patch of pine and olive, until they came upon a stone building Elias hadn't seen before. Not part of the monastery, but near it. It looked older—weathered beyond age, covered in vines, half-collapsed on one side. A single wooden door remained intact. "This was the bellmaker's house," she said. "From when the monastery was still a place of pilgrimage. They say he lived alone for fifty years. Crafted bells from memory, then buried them." "Why?" "So no one would find them. He believed sound was sacred. And silence was holy." She stepped inside. Elias followed. The interior was almost bare. Dust lay thick on the floor, and beams of light filtered through holes in the roof. But at the center of the room, hanging from a wooden frame, was a single bell. It was small, bronze, unmarked. Genevieve stepped up to it and rang it once. The sound was delicate—high and pure, like the chime of crystal. Elias felt it in his chest. Not loud, but deep. Resonant. "He made this one for the dead," she said. "It's the only one they ever found." He looked at her. "Why bring me here?" "Because this is what I'm trying to become," she said. "Not louder. Just truer." She turned toward him, the bell swaying gently behind her. "I don't know how to be loved like this," she said. "Without walls. Without games." "You don't have to know," Elias said. "You just have to let it happen." She stepped closer. The air between them thinned. "I'm afraid," she whispered. "So am I." She looked at him, really looked, and nodded slowly. "That's fair." That night, rain came in waves. The wind howled through the monastery like a beast. Elias stayed in the chapel, reading by candlelight while Genevieve sat near the fire she had built in the hearth. She was writing again, her journal open, ink trailing across the page in sharp, fast strokes. "What are you writing?" he asked. "A memory." "Which one?" She hesitated, then read aloud. "Once, I danced in a ballroom in Vienna with a man I didn't love, wearing a dress I couldn't breathe in, under chandeliers that cost more than most homes. I smiled. I laughed. I flirted. But inside I was screaming, and no one heard it because the music was too loud." She closed the journal. "Here, I hear my scream. And I listen." Elias didn't know what to say. So he said nothing. And she seemed to appreciate that more than anything. They sat in the firelight until the rain faded and the candles burned low. Later, as Elias lay awake listening to the drip of water from the ceiling, he thought about the broken sundial. The bent tree. The buried bells. The way Genevieve had transformed herself not through drama, but through devotion. Not reinvention, but resurrection. And he realized something. He hadn't come just to find her. He had come to find himself. The violet hour wasn't just a place between day and night. It was the space between who they were and who they could become. And it was opening wider now. For both of them.
End of Chapter 5