He stepped over the threshold and the apartment suddenly felt cramped with his strange, adult presence. He set the bag on the table, and the old cellophane rustled as if something alive had woken inside. I wanted to hug him, but I stopped — there was an emptiness in his eyes, like someone who woke up in the middle of someone else’s dream.

“Mom, they found me at a bus stop in another town,” he said, his voice shaking the way it did when he was fifteen. “A woman in a headscarf gave me this bag and said, ‘Take it home.’ I don’t remember her face or the road. I only remember the smell of rain and that I was supposed to buy bread.”

I untied the knot on the bag’s handles. Inside there was no loaf, but an old metal alarm clock with frozen hands and a roll of yellowed paper. On the paper was a floor plan of our apartment — only with an extra room we never had. At the bottom, in my handwriting: “Don’t open.” The key from his pocket fit perfectly into a lock that didn’t exist in our walls.

The ticking started again when I touched the clock. The hands shivered and began to move backward. Behind the wall where the neighbors’ kitchen should have been, there was a soft click, like someone turning a key in a door that isn’t there.

I looked at my son. He smiled — for the first time in three years — and whispered, “Now you hear it too?”