That's all anyone is left with after Ezra Huxley's time machine shatters reality in 1916, Boston. The mechanical abomination plagues the city with an hourly time warp signaled by the bells of the new Custom House Tower Clock.
Isla Huxley's wedding ended in disaster after the Break, and now her husband is in a coma. She's spent the last three months in the Post Boston Infirmary, waiting for her rich uncle to fix her life yet again. But when he instead sends her out into Late Boston to retrieve her father's journal in hopes of fixing the time machine, she comes face to face with Dorian Verne, the man she once dreamed of having a future with before her uncle shipped her off to school in Europe.
Dorian lives a humble life as a clocksmith, but his skills are put to the test when the timeline-altered citizens of Late Boston come to him for mechanical remedies to survive the tolling of the bells from the cursed world clock. But Dorian was also Ezra's apprentice, and when the inventor disappears, he vows to build a new time machine and set things right. Not just for those living on clock-work and borrowed time, but for Isla, the one who got away.