"Because," he said, "Fallon's petition asks the town to believe two things at once: that the tower is dangerous, and that the man who wants its land is the right man to say so. And a town can believe one unlikely thing, but it has trouble believing two at the same time, especially when the evidence is sitting on a table in front of it."
She smiled, a little, despite herself. "You sound like a carpenter reasoning about a joint."
"I am a carpenter reasoning about a joint," he said. "A joint holds or it does not, and you can see which, if you look."
They sat until the coffee was gone and the light through the tower window went gold and then gray, and then they went down together, and Maren walked back to her lodging alone, because that was still the arrangement, and the street was quiet, and the print shop was dark, and on the board outside it a new sheet had been pinned over the old one. She did not stop to read it. She had read enough of Fallon's words for one day. But as she passed, a boy she did not know came running up with a fresh stack of the evening edition, and he thrust one into her hand the way boys thrust papers into every hand on a street, and she took it without thinking, and the headline, in the last light, said: MEETING TOMORROW — SHALL THE TOWER FALL?
She folded the paper and put it in her pocket beside the morning's editorial, and she walked on, and above her the clock face showed the hour, white against the darkening sky, its hands moving in the steady, unhurried way that true things move, and she thought about the counterweight inside the movement, the small, heavy piece of brass that does not fight gravity but answers it, balancing the swing, keeping the beat honest. A counterweight, her father used to say, is not the enemy of the pendulum. It is the reason the pendulum can be trusted.
Tomorrow evening, she thought, the town would decide whether it wanted a tower or a printing house. And she, who had come to Fox Creek to mend a clock and nothing more, would stand in a room full of her neighbors and ask them to believe the evidence of their own eyes. She did not know whether it would be enough. But she knew, with a sudden and complete certainty that surprised her, that she was no longer mending the town's time as an outsider hired for the job. She was keeping it as one of them, and whatever happened tomorrow, that change had already been made, and no editorial could unmake it.
She reached her lodging and lit the lamp, and took out her father's tool case, and opened it, and looked at the tools lying in their fitted places, each one worn to the shape of a hand that was not hers and yet had taught hers everything it knew. She picked up the smallest screwdriver, the one she had used at noon, and held it up to the light, and it was steady in her hand, and she thought: small work first. Then the rest, in its own time. And she slept, with the paper folded on the table beside her and the clock's true time ticking somewhere above the town, like a heart that had learned, after a long silence, how to beat again.
Before she slept, though, she lay awake a little while and thought about the first clock her father had ever let her take apart, when she was twelve and her hands were still too small for the tools. She had been frightened of the counterweight most of all, that dense piece of brass, because it seemed to pull against everything else. Her father had laughed, not unkindly, and told her to stop thinking of it as an enemy. A pendulum wants to swing too far, he had said. Left alone it would spend itself in wild arcs and call that freedom, and then it would stop altogether. The counterweight does not fight the swing. It answers it, a little weight against a little force, until the swing becomes a beat you can trust. She had never forgotten that lesson. Now, lying in the dark with Fallon's paper on her table and the town's noon checks written in a logbook down the street, she understood that a town is a movement too, and that evidence is its counterweight. Fallon had spent the day pushing the swing as far as it would go. Tomorrow, she and Soren would lay their evidence on the table, one piece at a time, and see whether the town's beat could be trusted.