In 1965 Boston, Moira Donnelly watches the sparsely attended funeral of Ernest Duquesne, a State Department man publicly accused of selling secrets to the Russians. She approaches Ernest’s teenage niece, Amelia Duquesne, and probes for a specific item Ernest possessed: a Glashütte watch with a white dial and gold bezel. Moira implies the watch is dangerous if it reaches Russia, gives Amelia her card, and pointedly warns her: do not wind it.

At Pembroke Academy, Amelia endures gossip and cruelty about Ernest’s alleged treason and about Amelia’s family. After a confrontation in class gets her sent into the hallway, Amelia admits to herself she lied at the cemetery: the watch arrived anonymously in her school mailbox days earlier, and she has been wearing it. Grieving and angry, she ignores Moira’s warning and winds the crown; the watch’s hands stop, then begin moving backward.

As Amelia reenters the classroom, she experiences a sudden, disorienting fall and lands in a dark, silent maze of towering shelves lined with old leather books. Panicked, Amelia fumbles with the watch and is yanked back to the cemetery moments after the funeral scene began. Moira is waiting, confirms it is still around 8:00 a.m., and matter-of-factly prepares to send Amelia “back to the right time.” Quoting poetry about graves as portals, Moira forces the issue by shoving Amelia into the open grave, using it as a passageway.

After Amelia returns to class through a door that appears when she manipulates the watch, Moira confronts her again at lunch and removes Amelia from school by deceiving the dean. At Ernest’s house, Moira explains what Amelia experienced: the “time space,” a rare place where thoughts and memories persist as books in a vast collective library. Moira reveals Ernest did not work for the State Department at all; he worked for the CIA as a “timekeeper” conducting temporal reconnaissance, and he was murdered by a communist enemy rather than exposed as one.

Moira outlines the larger conflict: rebels have been stealing timekeeper watches and may be allied with the Russians. Ernest was killed while searching for a hidden “book of lost memories” containing, among other things, the knowledge of how to make timekeeper watches—memories largely erased when Nazis entered the time space and destroyed watchmakers’ traces. Because Amelia is unknown to the Russians and now has Ernest’s heirloom watch and access to the time space, Moira pressures her to help recover the book, threatening institutionalization if Amelia refuses. Cornered but defiant, Amelia asks what happens if she agrees, and Moira answers: Amelia becomes a timekeeper.