The Stranger Returned the Watch I Hadn't Noticed Losing

My late father's watch is the only thing of his I wear — a plain old thing, nothing valuable, but his, and I don't take it off. I was in an airport, an international transit hub in a country neither my father nor I had ever set foot in, jet-lagged and shuffling between gates, when a man tapped my shoulder.

He was ordinary — middle-aged, a traveller like the rest of us, a little hurried. He held out his hand, and in it was a watch, and he said, warmly, apologetically, 'You dropped this in Rome — I've been hoping to catch you,' and pressed it toward me.

It was my father's watch. Unmistakably: the specific worn strap, the small scratch on the face I know like my own skin, the stopped-and-restarted second hand's slightly loose sweep. His watch, held out to me by a stranger who said I'd dropped it in Rome.

I have never been to Rome. Not once, not ever, not that trip, not any trip — I could show you a passport innocent of Italy. And more than that, more immediately, more impossibly: the watch was on my wrist. I could feel it there. As the man held out my father's watch and told me I'd lost it in a city I'd never visited, I looked down at my own arm and my father's watch was where it always is, fastened, keeping its uneven time, exactly where I'd put it that morning and every morning.

Two of them. His singular, only, irreplaceable watch, on my wrist and in a stranger's hand at once, in an airport in a country I was only passing through, dropped in a city I'd never been to by a version of me who had.

I froze, and I think I said something like 'I have it, look' and lifted my wrist, and the man's face did something complicated — confusion, then a flicker of something like recognition or fear — and he looked at my wrist, and looked at the watch in his own hand, and I swear the one in his hand was there and then, in the busy blur of the concourse, was somehow not, and he was standing with an empty open palm, apologising, saying he must be mistaken, so sorry, wrong person, and melting back into the crowd of the gate before I could hold him, before I could ask, before I could do anything but stand there with my father's watch ticking on my wrist and the impossible echo of it fading from a stranger's empty hand.

I have my father's watch. One watch. I check it compulsively now. It's always there, always the only one. But I've never shaken the certainty that somewhere there's a version of my life that did go to Rome, that did lose the watch, and that a kind stranger spent his trip trying to return it to a me who, for one collision of a moment in a transit hall, stood close enough to this me to almost hand it back.