Borrowed Seconds

Dragging a stranger out of Baltimore harbor leaves Darius Bellamy with gold light in his eyes and a date above every head: the hour they die. His mother is in intensive care, the bill is a hundred thousand and he has five hundred, so he sells a medal his father taught him to read for one hundred and fifty thousand, pulls the heiress he saved from under a falling load, and plays her fiance before the grandfather who holds the vote. When an asthmatic girl stops breathing at the celebration, he pushes the gold out of his own hand into her halo, and she lives. Each time, the second hand on his father's old watch skips. He reads the forgery in a rival's gifts, the fracture inside four hundred million in rough stone, and the black core in a kingpin's leg brace that is quietly drinking his years. He wins the company, the harbor and the woman. What he cannot win back is one second: the gold goes out of his palm and a red ring he has never seen burns above his head, counting sixty, fifty-nine.