Whispers of the Broken Clock

---The Forgotten Café

Rain dripped from the edges of the old café’s awning, tracing slow rivers down the glass window. Inside, the air smelled of coffee, cinnamon, and nostalgia. Every afternoon at 4 p.m., Emma sat at the same corner table by the window — a ritual she had kept for the last three years.

No one really knew why. Some said she was waiting for someone. Others believed she simply liked the quiet. But Emma knew the truth: she was waiting for a moment that had long passed — the day the clock above the café counter had stopped ticking. The same day he left.

Liam.

The name still felt heavy in her chest, like a song that ended mid-verse.

They met in this very café, both strangers escaping the noise of their own lives. He was a photographer chasing sunsets, she was an artist chasing meaning. For months, they shared stolen smiles, spilled coffee, and whispered dreams between laughter. It was simple, and it was perfect.

Until the day he left for a photography trip abroad — and never came back.

A road accident, the newspaper said. No survivors. The clock above the counter stopped working that same day at 4:15 p.m., as if time itself had broken with her heart.


---

The Photograph

It was a Thursday when everything changed again. The rain had been heavier than usual, the world outside wrapped in a gray silence. Emma had been sketching in her worn-out notebook when the café door opened, and a gust of wind followed a man inside.

He was soaked, clutching a camera bag.

Something about the way he brushed his hair back — that careless flick, that familiar pause — made her heart skip. She told herself she was imagining it. But when he turned, the breath left her lungs.

It couldn’t be.

“Emma?” he asked softly, as if afraid the sound of her name might shatter the fragile air between them.

She stared, frozen. His voice, his eyes — they were Liam’s. Older, perhaps. Sadder. But unmistakably him.

“I— I thought you were—” She couldn’t even finish the word.

“Gone?” he smiled faintly. “I thought so too, for a while.”
He explained how he had survived but lost his memory for years. His camera was found at the scene, but he had wandered through hospitals and shelters, nameless, until fragments of the past returned — one of them being her name, written in his old photo journal.

He had followed that name back to the café.

The clock above the counter ticked once.

For the first time in three years.


---

Love Beyond Time

They sat for hours, talking, crying, laughing — rediscovering each other in stories they once told. It felt like no time had passed, yet everything had changed. He had seen the world and forgotten it all. She had stayed still and remembered every second.

That evening, as the rain finally stopped, the café filled with golden light. Liam looked at her the way he used to — like she was the only thing that had ever made sense.

“Do you think love waits?” he asked.

Emma smiled. “No. I think it remembers.”

Outside, the city moved on, but for them, time had begun again.


---

The Clock That Ticks Again

Weeks turned into months, and the café became their world once more. The broken clock above the counter had been repaired, but they both liked to say it had repaired itself.

Every day at 4:15, it chimed — a sound that echoed through their hearts, a reminder that even when love is lost to time, it has a way of finding its way back.

Liam’s photography exhibition, titled Whispers of the Broken Clock, opened a year later. The first photograph was of Emma, sitting by that café window — light and love reflected in her eyes.

Underneath the picture, a small caption read:

> “Some stories don’t end when time stops. They begin again when the heart remembers