And when she closed the tool case that evening, the click of the brass clasp sounded, to her, like a door shutting on a room she would not need to enter again until the right day came.
Soren Krogh had built many things in his life: barns that stood through winters, a bridge over a creek that flooded every spring, stairs that did not creak, and one clock tower, long ago in another town, that he had helped raise when he was still young enough to believe that anything built well would be kept. He had learned, since coming to Fox Creek, that a thing could be built well and still be in danger, not from weather or rot, but from a man with a printing press and a plan. He thought about that on the morning the trial began, standing in the street below the town hall with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the tower face, the way a man looks at a horse he has trained and is about to run in front of a crowd.
The terms of the trial had been Maren's idea, and Soren had agreed to them because they were the only terms that could not be argued with. For seven days, the repaired clock would have to keep railroad time. Every day at noon, the depot agent would come up from the station with his railroad watch, set by the railroad's own standard, and compare it to the tower hands in front of whoever cared to watch. No speeches. No petitions. No editorials. Just the hands, and the watch, and the truth between them. If the clock gained or lost more than a minute in a day, the trial failed, and Fallon's petition would have its proof. If it held true for seven days, the clock would have proved what no argument could: that it worked, that the tower that held it was worth keeping, and that the town did not need to tear down what it could repair.
Soren had spent the morning before the first noon check going over the tower the way he went over his own work before a customer saw it: every beam, every joint, every bolt in the new ladder, which he had built himself from sound pine and fitted rung by rung with his own hands. The new ladder did not creak. It did not give. It was the ladder he wished had been there on the day Maren fell, and he had built it as a kind of answer to that day, though he would never have said so aloud. He had warned the council about the old ladder, months before Maren arrived, and they had nodded and done nothing, and he had carried that knowledge since the fall like a stone in his pocket. He did not blame himself in words. He blamed himself in the way he checked the new ladder three times, and then a fourth, running his thumb over every rung joint, testing each one with his full weight before he would let Maren near it.
Maren was already in the tower room when he climbed up, her case open on the bench, her pocket watch in her left hand. Her right wrist was still bandaged, and she moved it carefully, the way a person moves a thing that has taught them respect. She looked up at him and nodded, calm as always, and Soren felt the familiar easing in his chest that her calm always gave him. She was not a woman who panicked. She was a woman who measured. In the weeks since the fall, he had learned to trust her measurements more than he trusted his own eyes, and that was a new thing for a carpenter, who lives by his eyes and his hands.
"Is it ready?" he asked.
"It is ready," she said. "The pendulum swings true. The hands are set. The rest is up to the days."
"And your wrist?"
"My wrist is a passenger today," she said, with the small, dry humor she used when she did not want to be fussed over. "It rides along. It does not drive."