John Bartine

Bartine is a Virginia gentleman whose heirloom watch was returned to his family after his great-grandfather, a Tory planter, vanished into rebel custody during the Revolution. The watch's habit of stopping at fatal moments has made him secretive and volatile, and he bristles when a friend demands he simply tell the time. His fierce, unapologetic bitterness about the past turns a parlor conversation into a haunted inheritance, pulling the reader into the story's central question of whether such things can be.