She puts it on. It has no hands. It ticks anyway.

She laughs—a real laugh, the kind that comes from the belly.

She walks to the door. He speaks to the candle: “The first time I saw you, you were crying on your balcony. Three months ago. You didn’t know anyone was watching. You cried like rain falls—without asking permission.”

It is the shared silence between two balconies.

They fall into a rhythm. Evenings: she brings wine, he brings silence. They work side by side—her drafting a pedestrian walkway, him soldering a hairspring. They do not touch. They do not confess.

She watches the current. “The person I was before I learned that love is a load-bearing wall. And the person I am now, who knows that even walls need cracks to breathe.”

He looks down. She looks up.

“Maintenant seulement” — “Only now.”

“What happened to your father?” she asks.

Clara’s mornings are governed by coffee and spreadsheets. Lukas’s mornings are governed by the soft tick-tick-tick of a 18th-century Comtoise clock he is restoring. Their only interaction is acoustic: her heels on the parquet, his muffled radio playing Satie.

The Second Balcony

She is furious at the poetry of it. She is an engineer. She does not need metaphors.

One Tuesday, a violent vent du sud (south wind) tears through Lyon. Clara is on her balcony, frantically retrieving a flapping blueprint. A single page—a delicate sketch of a pedestrian bridge over the Saône—escapes her grip and sails upward. It lands, neatly, at Lukas’s feet.

“Are you happy?” she asks.

He kisses her forehead. Then her left eyelid. Then the corner of her mouth.