He wrapped the rung in cloth and put it in a drawer, and he locked the drawer, and he sat for a long time in the quiet of his workshop, listening to the night sounds of Fox Creek, and thinking about the woman who had fallen into his arms that morning, and about the town that had let its ladder rot, and about the question he would keep until Maren's wrist allowed her to look at the rung with a clockmaker's eye: what, exactly, had broken that morning, and why it had broken clean.
The morning after the fall, Maren woke with her wrist aching in its bandage and her first thought, before she was properly awake, was of the clock: of the cracked spring and the grime and the movement waiting in the tower room, silent, for hands that could not yet do what they were told. She lay still for a moment, listening to the boarding house stir around her, Mrs. Petersen moving in the kitchen below, a wagon passing in the street, and she made herself think the way her father had taught her to think when a job went wrong: not about what was lost, but about what remained. What remained was her left hand, which was steady. What remained was her knowledge, which no fall could sprain. What remained was Soren Krogh, who had caught her and who had promised his hands, and who, she was beginning to understand, kept his promises the way he kept his tools: clean, sharp, and ready.
She dressed with difficulty, one-handed, and went down to breakfast, where Mrs. Petersen took one look at her and set a plate before her without asking, and cut the bread for her, and poured the coffee, and did it all without making a fuss, which Maren appreciated more than she could say, because fuss is a kind of pity, and pity, in the morning, is hard to swallow. Mrs. Petersen also laid the morning's Gazette beside the plate, folded to the front page, and Maren saw at once, before she had taken a bite, that the fall had made the news.
The headline was not about the clock. It was about the tower.
TOWER NEARLY CLAIMS A LIFE, it read, in large black letters. And beneath it, in smaller type: Young Woman Repairer Falls From Rotten Ladder — Council's Neglect Endangers Town.
Maren read the article with her coffee growing cold. It told the story of her fall, and it told it, she had to admit, with a certain skill: the rotten ladder, the council's ignored warnings, the young woman from out of town who had trusted Fox Creek and nearly paid for that trust with her life. It quoted Soren, or claimed to, saying the ladder had been rotten for years, though Maren doubted Soren had spoken to any newspaperman, because Soren was not a man who spoke to newspapermen. It quoted no one from the council. And at the end, in a paragraph set apart like a punchline, it said: "The Gazette asks, in the interest of public safety, whether a tower that cannot be climbed without risk to life and limb ought to stand at all, when the lot it occupies might serve the town in safer and more profitable hands."
"Safer and more profitable hands," Maren said aloud, and Mrs. Petersen, who was wiping the table, snorted.
"That is Mr. Fallon's phrase," Mrs. Petersen said. "He has been using it for a year. The tower lot, he says, is wasted on a tower. He wants it for his printing house. He has wanted it since his press outgrew his present shop, and he has not been shy about saying so, in print and out of it. A man who owns a newspaper does not need to shout. He only needs to print, and the town reads, and the town repeats, and after a while the town believes it thought of the idea itself."
Maren folded the paper carefully, with her good hand, and set it aside. "He is using my fall."
"He is," Mrs. Petersen said bluntly. "And he will use it again, in every edition, until the tower comes down or the town tells him to stop. That is what a newspaper is, Miss Reed, when it belongs to one man with one interest: it is not news. It is a lever."
Maren went to the tower that morning, because work was the only answer she knew to trouble, and she found Soren already there, in the clock room at the top of the new ladder, sweeping out the last of the dust, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his hands steady on the broom. The new ladder was solid under her feet as she climbed, one-handed, with Soren coming down to meet her halfway and offering his arm, which she took, because pride, she had decided the day before, was a luxury she could no longer afford, and because accepting help gracefully, as Soren had told her, was its own kind of work.