Fallon rose again, and for the first time that evening his smoothness faltered, just a little, the way a man's voice falters when he reaches the end of the road he has prepared and finds another road there that he did not prepare. He said the sale notice was an old matter, a contingency, a thing printed in case the council ever decided to sell. He said the rung proved nothing about him. He said the trial proved nothing about the future, only about five days. He said all of this reasonably, and well, and Soren, listening, thought that Fallon was still a formidable man, and that the room would have to decide not whether Fallon was clever — he was — but whether cleverness was the same as truth.
Before the council withdrew, one of the councilmen, an older man with a farmer's hands who had said nothing all evening, leaned forward and asked Soren a plain question: if the tower stood, who would see to the ladder, year after year, so that no one fell again? Soren answered the way he answered questions about work: the new ladder was sound, he would inspect it each spring and each autumn, and he would replace any rung that showed wear before it showed weakness, and he would write the inspection in the town's book so that the next caretaker, whoever he was, would know what had been done. The councilman nodded, satisfied, and then he turned to Maren and asked a question Soren had not expected, though he should have: who would keep the clock, once the trial was over and she had gone on to the next town? Maren was quiet for a moment, and Soren watched her choose her words the way she chose tools, carefully and without haste. "The clock," she said, "needs a keeper who knows its movement and a town that asks for its time to be true. I can teach the first part to willing hands. The second part is yours." The councilman nodded again, more slowly this time, and wrote something down, and Soren felt the weight of that unanswered question settle between them: the tower's fate would be decided tonight, but the clock's keeping belonged, he suspected, not to the council at all, but to the woman beside him.
The chairman thanked them all, and the council withdrew to a side room, and the meeting room waited, and the waiting was the hardest part of the evening, harder than the speaking, because in speaking you have something to do and in waiting you have only the sound of your own heart. Around them the room murmured, and the schoolteacher came over and stood beside Soren and said, quietly, that she had initialed the log every day she was present and would do so again, and the depot agent, passing with his hat in his hands, stopped long enough to say that his own book agreed with the town's book. Small things, Soren thought, but a building is only small things fitted true, and a town, he was learning, is the same. Soren sat beside Maren in the front row, and neither of them spoke, and he looked at her hands, folded in her lap, the right one still a little stiff, and he thought about the morning she fell, and about the weight of her in his arms, and about how little he had known then of what that weight would come to mean: not a romance, not a rescue to be retold, but a job, and then another job, and then a partnership, built the way everything sound is built, one true joint at a time.
The council came back sooner than he expected. The chairman stood, and he looked tired, and he looked relieved, and he said, in the plain voice of a man delivering a decision rather than an opinion, that the council had considered the petition and the answer, and that the petition was declined. The tower would stand. The trial would run to its seventh day, as agreed, with the case locked between checks and the key in his keeping. The town would maintain the tower and the new ladder, and the clock would be kept, and the lot would not be sold.
He did not make a speech about it. He did not need to. The room exhaled, the way a room exhales when a weight it did not know it was carrying is set down, and people began to talk, quietly at first and then all at once, and Fallon gathered his petition board and his papers, and walked out without speaking to anyone, and Soren watched him go, and felt no triumph, only the tired, sober relief of a man whose building has passed its load test: it stands, and that is enough, and tomorrow there will be other work.