Ring once at four, the instruction said. Do not wait for me. Petra found it in the bell room after her father's death and assumed it belonged to the morning he collapsed. The date, however, was missing.
She went to the close at four the next morning. A baker was unloading flour, and a cleaner crossed the square with a cart. The baker recognized the instruction: years earlier, the bell mechanism had been repaired overnight, and her father asked an assistant to test it before the streets filled.
Petra should have felt relieved. Instead, she was disappointed that the sentence did not contain a last message meant for her. The baker offered tea and described her father arriving after that test, pleased that the sound carried cleanly through the empty square.
On the walk home, Petra heard the bell again at its usual hour. She put the instruction back among the repair papers. It belonged to a morning when her father expected to return, not to the day he could not. That ordinary expectation was more difficult to hold than a prophecy, and eventually more comforting.