The Water Clock

Margaret has spent her life outrunning time. A senior executive at a prestigious firm, she measures her worth in fifteen-minute increments, resets her German desk clock against the atomic clock in Colorado each morning, and believes that if she is precise enough, early enough, productive enough, she will finally be safe. She will not fall behind. She will not be forgotten. She will not become her father—a man who left when she was young, resurfaced in her twenties wanting a relationship, and is now disappearing into the fog of dementia, calling out names she does not recognize.

But time is not cooperating. The migraine auras are worsening. The second hand on her seven-hundred-dollar clock hesitates. And the Pendleton Tower—a relic at the center of the city that has not kept accurate time for over a century—has begun to chime for her alone.

When Margaret inherits Evermore, her aunt's estate on the banks of the tidal estuary, she tells herself she will sell it. She has no time for the old house, the overgrown grove of ancient trees, the strange water clock that has sat in the study for generations with its water suspended between two glass vessels, waiting. But the house has other plans. The grove is breathing. The clock is warm to the touch. And a voice has begun to speak to her in dreams—a voice that sounds like her own, older, wiser, impossibly still.

"You are not behind. You are not late. You have never been late."

As Margaret divides herself between the glass towers of the city and the ancient rhythms of Evermore, she finds herself unraveling. Her father is dying. Her assistant is terrified of her disappearance. A developer is circling the property. A realtor who has spent his life selling land he cannot own is drawn to the grove at night. And the water clock has begun to move—not measuring hours, but something else. Something she has been running from her entire life.

The Water Clock is a novel of awakening, legacy, and the love that passes from one vessel to another without losing itself. It asks the question we have all been taught to fear: What if time is not something we are losing, but something we have always been inside?

Margaret's journey takes her from the glass towers of Tidewater to the tidal estuary where salt water meets fresh, from the facility where her father is forgetting her name to the study where a clock has been waiting for generations. Along the way, she must learn what her aunt Anna knew: that the structures we build to hold our lives—trusts, careers, schedules, the frantic motion of a life spent measuring—cannot hold. Only love passes from one vessel to another without losing itself.

For readers of Cloud Atlas, The Overstory, and the films of Terrence Malick, The Water Clock weaves together magical realism and literary fiction to tell the story of a woman who must stop running in order to discover that she has already arrived.

The water does not ask where it is going. It only asks where it is.