At noon the depot agent compared his watch to the dial, the way he had for four days, and he nodded, and he initialed the log, and the schoolteacher initialed it beside him, and the clock stood true against railroad time by less than a breath, and Maren wrote the entry herself, in her own hand, with the date and the hour and the words "true at noon," and then she closed the case and locked it, and handed the key to the council chairman, who had come in late and stood at the back with his hat in his hands.
He took the key and looked at her for a long moment, and she saw in his face the exact shape of a man caught between two pressures: Fallon's petition on one side, and the evidence of his own eyes on the other.
"Miss Reed," he said, quietly, so that only she and Soren could hear, "there will be a town meeting tomorrow evening. The council has moved it up. Mr. Fallon has asked that the petition be heard before the trial ends, and the council has agreed to hear it."
"Before the seventh day," Maren said. It was not a question.
"Before the seventh day," he said. "I am sorry. But I thought you should hear it from me before you read it in his paper."
She nodded, and thanked him, and he went out, and she stood in the vestibule with the locked clock case behind her and the trial log open on the table, and Soren came and stood beside her, and neither of them spoke for a while, because there was nothing to say that would make tomorrow evening come any slower.
That afternoon Maren worked at the bench Soren had set up for her in the corner of the tower room, doing the small work her wrist would allow: cleaning screws, sorting the tools in her father's case, polishing the brass plate that bore the clockmaker's name, a man dead twenty years whose work she had inherited the care of. She thought about her father, who had taught her that a clock does not lie and does not flatter, that it only tells, and that the whole craft rests on that single honesty. She thought about the road she had traveled for five years, town to town, mending other people's time and never staying anywhere long enough for anyone to mend hers. And she thought about Fallon's editorial, and the word "outsider," and how it had stung not because it was false — she was an outsider; she had arrived eight weeks ago with a tool case and a letter of hire — but because it was true in a way that no longer felt complete. She knew the names of the people in the noon crowd now. She knew which timber in the tower creaked in the wind and which did not. She knew the exact weight of the key she had handed to the council chairman. An outsider, she thought, is a person who has not yet been counted. And she was being counted now, whether Fallon liked it or not, one initial at a time, in a logbook that anyone could read.
In the late afternoon Soren came up to the tower room with two cups of coffee, and they drank it sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, the way they had on the first days, when her wrist was in a sling and his hands did everything and the clock was still a stopped, silent thing between them.
"Tomorrow evening," Soren said, "I will show them the rung."
"I know," Maren said.
"And you will show them the newspaper."
"I know," she said again.
"And the log will show them the rest," he said.
"And if it is not enough?" she asked. She had not meant to ask it aloud, but the tower room was a private place, and Soren was a private man, and the question had been sitting in her chest all afternoon like a stone in a shoe.
"Then it is not enough," Soren said, plainly, "and we will have done true work anyway, and the tower will be pulled down by men who did not look at the evidence, and you will go on to the next town, and I will stay here and build something else. But I do not think it will come to that."
"Why not?" she asked.