Outside the Gazette office, Otis Fallon stood in his doorway with a pencil behind his ear and a proof sheet in his hand. He saw her, and he smiled, the practiced smile of a man who is used to being read and who enjoys the reading.
"Still ticking, Miss Reed?" he called out, pleasantly, as if they were old friends. "Let us hope it keeps ticking when it matters."
Maren stopped. The sun was hot on the back of her neck. She could feel the old newspaper in her mind as clearly as if it were in her hand: the date, the heavy type, the words "possession to follow the removal of the present structure," printed four days before she fell. She could have answered him with it. She could have stood there in the street and quoted his own advertisement back at him, and watched his smile go away. The words rose up in her, sharp and ready, and she let them rise, and then she let them pass, the way you let a pendulum swing past its center and come back on its own.
"It ticks, Mr. Fallon," she said, evenly. "That is what clocks are for."
Fallon laughed, a short, easy laugh, and went back inside to his presses. Maren walked on to the store, bought her oil, and walked back with the bottle wrapped in paper in her left hand. Her wrist ached from the walk and from holding herself still, but the ache was a small price. She thought of her father then, as she sometimes did when she needed steadying: he had once told her, over a watch that a customer swore had never been dropped, never to show a man the broken part while you were still angry at him for breaking it. Show him the broken part when the repair is done, he had said, so that he sees the fault and the fix together, and cannot pretend one without the other. She had not understood him then. She understood him now. The paper in her case was a broken part. The clock, ticking true, would be the repair. Shown together, at the right time, they would be impossible to argue away. Shown now, in anger, in the street, the paper would only be a quarrel, and Fallon was better at quarrels than anyone in Fox Creek.
When she came back up to the tower room, Soren looked at her face and set down his tools.
"You met him," he said. It was not a question.
"I met him," Maren said. "He was smiling."
Soren nodded once, slowly, and picked his tools back up. He did not ask what Fallon had said. He did not need to. The two of them understood each other well enough by now that a single sentence could carry the whole of a morning, and the morning had carried enough already.
They worked then, for the rest of the morning, in the companionable quiet they had built between them over the weeks: she pointing with her left hand, naming each part and each step in her calm, precise voice; he doing the fine work with his carpenter's hands, which had learned, under her teaching, to be as delicate as any clockmaker's. The clock parts went back into the movement one by one. The pendulum, on its new spring, swung in a clean, even arc. The hands, when Soren fitted them, pointed to the true time, and Maren checked them against her own pocket watch, which she had set that morning, and nodded.
At noon, she stepped out of the town hall into the street, and she looked up at the tower face. The hands pointed to twelve, straight and true. A woman with a basket stopped beside her, looked up too, and said, "It is good to see it moving again."
"Yes," Maren said. "It is."
She did not tell the woman about the paper. She did not need to. The paper was safe in her father's case, folded beside the spare spring and the broken spring, between the tools that fixed things and the tools that had fixed her. She walked back into the hall with the sun on her shoulders, and the clock ticking behind the wall, and she thought about the days ahead: the trial, the noons, the town watching, the paper waiting. She had come to Fox Creek to repair a clock that had stopped. She had found something else that had stopped, too: the town's belief that what it had built was worth keeping. The clock would have to prove itself first. The paper would prove the rest.