The old man arrived at the hospice with a battered briefcase and no family.

 

Inside the briefcase were ten watches — each one wound, yet stopped at a different hour.

 

The nurses thought him eccentric. The social worker, brisk and unsentimental, called him "an interesting case." But when he spoke, his voice was that of a man accustomed to being listened to — not because of wealth or position, but because he spoke with the calm precision of someone who had once built arguments for a living. Each pause carried deliberation, as if words had weight and silence its own kind of verdict.

 

His posture betrayed old discipline. Even in the hospice gown, he sat upright — not out of vanity, but habit. The habit of men who once chaired meetings, signed things that mattered, and spent their lives pretending certainty was a form of virtue.

 

He insisted that the watches be kept beside his bed. "They're not mine," he said. "They're promises." No one pressed him for more. The dying, after all, were allowed their metaphors.

 

Sometimes he would ask for the blinds to be drawn open. He liked to watch the slow crawl of morning traffic along the expressway — the way cars moved with purpose while he waited for the day to finish him. "Look at that," he said once to the nurse. "They all think they're late for something that won't remember them."

 

At night, when the ward settled into the low, rhythmic breathing of sleep, a faint ticking came from his table — not constant, but intermittent, as though time itself were testing its pulse.

 

Sometimes he would lift a watch to his ear and murmur as if cross-examining it: "Was that the moment, then? The signature? The silence?"

 

The nurses joked that even Death would have to wait for him to finish winding his clocks.

 

But one of them — a young Malay nurse with the patience of someone who had already seen too much — sometimes lingered by the doorway, listening. She said later that he looked as if he were bargaining with time, not against it.

 

Days passed. He declined the morphine, preferring the clarity of discomfort.

 

He said pain was proof that the debt was being paid. "Sedation," he told the doctor, "is a form of forgetfulness. And I've forgotten enough in one lifetime."

 

Each evening, he would wind one of the stopped watches — not to make it run, but as if to remind it what motion once felt like — whisper something inaudible, and then fall asleep. The nurses learned to leave him undisturbed.

 

One night, a young intern — curious, sentimental — stayed behind after his shift. The old man was awake, eyes sharp under the hospice's tired fluorescent lights.

 

The room smelled faintly of Dettol and rain. A streetlamp outside flickered like a pulse about to stop.

 

"Why so many watches, Uncle?" the intern asked softly.

 

The old man smiled. "Each one stopped when I broke faith with someone," he said. "Time doesn't forgive easily."

 

He pointed to the first watch, its cracked face frozen at 11:42. "That was my mother's. I promised her I'd visit every Sunday. Work got in the way."

 

Another at 3:10 — his wife's, perhaps. "I should have said I was sorry before she left."

 

One at 7:05 — the hour his partner jumped from their office window, the result of a ruinous deal. "I told him risk was the price of greatness. I believed that victory justified loss. The newspapers called us visionaries. I thought I had outplayed the gods. But the clock doesn't take applause."

 

He gave a short laugh — the dry, unmusical kind that sounds like a man remembering his own defence in a trial he now knows he deserved to lose. "The law rewards cleverness," he said. "But time rewards conscience. Only one of them lasts."

 

The intern swallowed. "Why keep them?"

 

The old man's eyes softened. "Because regret, if tended long enough, becomes remembrance. And remembrance — that's the last form of love."

 

He turned one of the watches over and traced a faint engraving with his thumb. "L.K., 1978," it read. "He was my first client," the old man murmured. "Lost everything because I found a loophole clever enough to make the guilty look clean. That was the first time a clock stopped. I thought it was coincidence. It wasn't."

 

He glanced at the intern. "You're studying medicine. That's good. You'll learn that all professions are faiths. Ours was the law of words — yours is the law of bodies. Both pretend to heal, both end in judgment."

 

He gave a thin smile. "You think youth is courage, boy. It isn't. It's ignorance with energy. Courage is when you still do what's right after you know how much it costs."

 

He paused, then added almost to himself, "I gave my life to the clock, boy. Every tick was a wager I thought I'd win. But time always collects."

 

He leaned back and closed his eyes. "You'll learn this: the world forgives success, not sincerity. I had both once, but I chose the wrong one."

 

The intern did not know how to reply. He wanted to say something — anything — but the words felt too small beside that quiet admission. Outside, the rain had stopped. The silence stretched, and for a moment, it seemed that even the machines in the corridor had paused to listen.

 

Later, when he finally slept, the intern noticed his hand resting over one of the watches — a reflex, as if he feared time might slip away before he could account for it. The watch's face reflected the fluorescent light, a pale disc like the moon — cold, impartial, eternal.

 

At dawn, the intern found him motionless, one watch still ticking faintly — the only one that had ever resumed. It stopped at 6:59, just before sunrise.

 

When they packed his belongings, the briefcase was missing one watch. No one knew which. Perhaps the intern had taken it. Perhaps the old man had decided that one promise, at least, could be forgiven.

 

The nurse said the air smelled of metal when he died, like an old clock wound too tight. "He must have been important once," she said. The social worker shrugged. "They all were, in their own way." But the intern stood very still, because he knew that not all men die twice — once in body, and again in the memory of what they could have repaired.

 

At the cremation, there were no mourners — only the staff from the hospice and the intern, standing slightly apart.

 

The intern carried a small envelope with a single watch inside, its hands still moving with quiet precision. He did not wear it. He kept it in his coat pocket, as though unsure he had yet earned the right to measure time honestly.

In the years that followed, his speech began to echo the old man's — to students, to patients, even to himself. He would say, "The clock doesn't forgive," or "Pain is proof the debt is being paid." The words came unbidden, like fragments of an inherited conscience.

 

Years later, a patient died under his care. The inquiry was harsh. As he listened to the verdict, he felt the weight of the watch in his pocket. It was still ticking. Then he understood: conscience doesn't clear your name. It only reminds you what you've done.

 

He never opened the watch again. But in every silence — before an operation, before a decision, before a lie — he heard it ticking.

 

Time, perhaps. Or conscience.

 

Or maybe the echo of a man who once bet everything on success, and learned too late that the real wager is whether you can live — and die — without lying to yourself.