My hands shook as I unfolded the thin paper. It was a note in Tom’s neat handwriting. He wrote that he had won the watch as a young man from a drowning tourist whose life he saved, and the tourist had insisted he keep it. Tom had always been too ashamed to wear it, because he felt he had not earned it. He had left it to me and hidden the note, hoping I would one day understand it was meant for whichever Penhallow needed it most.

Mr. Dunstan told us he had known the value the moment he saw it. He could easily have paid Jamie the four hundred and sold it for a fortune. But the boy had cried quietly while he signed the form, and Mr. Dunstan had sat awake all night. He refused to take a penny of profit. He returned the watch and tore up the receipt, and he even gave Jamie his four hundred pounds back for the trouble. I shook his hand until he blushed.

Jamie wept and said he was sorry. I put my arm around him and told him that Tom would have laughed. Tom would have said that a Penhallow in trouble was exactly who the watch was for. I asked him why he had not just told me about the boiler. He said he did not want to be a burden. I told him that being family means being exactly that, and he nodded, and I think he finally believed me.

We took the watch to an auction house in Plymouth, and it sold for thirty-eight thousand pounds. We fixed the boiler, paid for Jamie’s marine engineering course, and gave a large gift to the lifeboat station where Tom volunteered. I kept the cracked leather strap, which still smells of the sea. Mr. Dunstan visits every Christmas with a bottle of sherry, and Jamie now volunteers on the lifeboat himself, on Tom’s old seat.