Realistic red roses and pocket watch on upper arm

The watch stopped again on Tuesday at twenty past four, which is the hour Dad always wound it. I have it open on the kitchen table now, beside the roses you left in the jug. The red ones with the bruised edges that you said would not see the week out. They have seen nine days. There are still beads of water sitting on the petals where I forgot to change it, and every morning they look as if someone has been crying into them in the night, which is nonsense, but I have started talking to them anyway.

Mr Okafor from the post office says the mainspring has gone and the repair will cost more than the thing is worth. I told him it was never worth money. It was the way Dad held it up to the window, squinting, and said there, hear that, that is a heart doing its job. This morning a petal came loose, drifted past the bud and settled on the bench by the cellar door, so I picked it up and tucked it inside the case under the glass, next to the hands. I don't know why. It seemed the only place it would be kept.

I went through the drawer last night looking for the jeweller's receipt and found your letter from Brighton instead, the one with the pier on the envelope. You wrote that you would be home for the roses in June. You wrote that the garden would be full of them by then, and that I was to leave the back gate open so the cat could come and go. I read it twice standing up, then sat on the stairs and read it a third time, the way you used to read me the shipping forecast when I couldn't sleep.

So I have decided not to wind it. Let the hands sit where they stopped, twenty past four, with the petal lying on the dial like a small red ticket. Come home when the roses have gone brown at the edges, love. I'll be the one at the gate.