Four days down. Three to go.
She walked to the town hall with her tool case in her hand, as she had each morning of the trial, and on the way she passed the print shop. The door was open, and the smell of ink came out into the street, and on the board outside, where Otis Fallon pinned his fresh sheets for passersby to read, there was a new editorial, the ink still dark. She stopped, because she had learned in the last week that it was better to read Fallon's attacks in the street, alone, than to hear them repeated back to her by someone trying to soften them.
The headline said: THE OUTSIDER'S CLOCK.
She read the whole of it standing there, her tool case heavy in her left hand. Fallon wrote well; that was the worst of it. He did not rant. He reasoned, in the smooth voice of a man careful to print only things that cannot quite be disproved. A woman who travels from town to town, he wrote, has no stake in Fox Creek. She arrives, she is paid, she leaves. What does she care if the clock she mends runs fast or slow six months from now, when she is three counties away? And who watches the watchers? The noon checks, he wrote, are made by a depot agent who is a friend of the carpenter, and the log is kept in the town hall where the clock's friends can write whatever they like in it. He did not say, outright, that the trial was rigged. He said, "A wise town does not stake its safety on a performance," and he said, "The tower that broke a woman's wrist will break something worse if we let sentiment keep it standing," and he said that the petition to demolish the tower had already gathered more names than the council seemed willing to count.
Maren read it twice. Then she took the sheet down off the board, folded it, and put it in her pocket. Not in anger. In the way you keep a piece of evidence: flat, whole, dated.
Soren was waiting for her at the town hall steps, and he saw her face before she said anything, and he said, "He printed another one."
"He printed another one," she said, and handed him the folded sheet. He read it standing on the steps, his mouth tightening, and when he finished he folded it again, more carefully than she had, and gave it back to her.
"He is frightened," Soren said.
"He is not frightened enough to stop," Maren said.
"No," Soren said. "But he is frightened enough to lie in a new direction, which means the old direction stopped working for him."
They went inside, up the stairs to the tower room, where the clock movement stood in its case with the door open, the way it had to be for the trial, and Soren set his own tools down and looked at her hand. He had watched that hand for weeks, the way a man watches weather: not staring, but noticing. She held it out, palm down, and turned it, and rolled an imaginary screwdriver between her fingers, and he nodded.
"Steady," he said.
"Steady," she agreed. "Not strong. But steady."
"Small work, then," he said. "Not the spring. Not the lifting. The rating nut, perhaps, if it needs it. A fraction at a time."
She had been waiting for this permission, and it surprised her to find that what she felt was not only relief. There was something else underneath it, something she did not have a name for until she stood there with her hand steady and Soren's hands at his sides, no longer needed for the small work, and she understood that the partnership was about to change. For weeks she had needed his hands the way a voice needs a throat. If her hands could do the small work again, then what she had with Soren would no longer be necessity. It would be choice. And choice, she was discovering, was a heavier and more frightening thing than need, because need can be explained and choice must simply be stood behind.
They worked through the morning in the quiet way they had learned to work together. Soren checked the tower timbers, running his hands along the beams and tapping them with his knuckles, listening for the sound that tells a carpenter whether wood is sound or hollow. Maren cleaned the movement's lower pivots and oiled them with a single drop each, her left hand holding the oiler steady while her right guided it, and the work went slowly but it went truly, and twice Soren had to remind her to rest the wrist, and twice she ignored him and then rested it anyway, because he was right and she knew it.