Outside, the evening had gone dark, and the clock face showed above the street, white against the night, its hands moving in the steady way that true things move. Soren and Maren stood on the town hall steps together, and the crowd thinned around them, and people stopped to shake Soren's hand and to nod to Maren, and the depot agent, passing, touched his hat and said, "Noon tomorrow, then," and Maren said, "Noon tomorrow," and Soren thought about the two days left in the trial, and about the seventh day, and about what came after the seventh day, which no one had yet decided, least of all the woman standing beside him, whose future in Fox Creek was still an open question, like a door that has been unlocked but not yet opened.
He walked her back to her lodging, because the streets were dark, and they did not talk much on the way, which suited them both. At her door she stopped and looked back down the street toward the tower, and he stopped beside her and looked too, and the clock face showed above the roofs, white in the dark, its hands at their true places, and he thought about how strange it was that a thing of brass and wood and glass could remind a town that it was a town. "Two more days," she said, quietly, as if she were counting stitches or rungs or anything else that must be finished properly. "Two more days," he agreed. "And then?" she asked, and he knew she did not mean the trial. He did not answer at once, because he had learned, in the weeks of working beside her, that some questions are load-bearing, and that you do not answer a load-bearing question with the first words that come to hand. "And then," he said at last, "we will see what the seventh day says. The clock has kept its part of the bargain so far. Let us let it finish." She nodded, and went inside, and he stood a moment longer in the street, looking up at the tower he kept, and at the hands moving across its face in the steady way that true things move, and he thought that whatever she decided, the tower would stand, and that was something, and that the rest — the keeping, the staying, the bench by a window that did not yet exist — would have to wait for the seventh day.
Maren woke on the sixth morning of the trial with her wrist aching in the way it ached now when the weather turned, a dull, familiar pressure along the inside of the joint, and she lay still a moment and tested it the way she did every morning, turning her hand one way and then the other, rolling an imaginary screwdriver between her fingers. Steady. Not strong, not yet, but steady, and steady had carried her through the fifth day and through the meeting, and steady, she thought, would carry her through the rest, whatever the rest turned out to be.
She dressed and ate, and walked to the town hall with her tool case in her hand, and the street was already busy in the morning light, and people nodded to her as she passed, the way people nod to someone they have decided, without quite saying so, is one of them. The miller's wife called out a greeting. The farrier lifted a hand from his work. The schoolteacher, hurrying past with a stack of books, paused long enough to say, "Noon today, and noon tomorrow," and Maren smiled and said, "And then we shall see."
Soren was waiting at the town hall steps, and he fell into step beside her without a word, the way work partners do, and they went up to the tower room together, where the clock movement stood in its locked case, waiting for noon the way it had waited every day of the trial. Soren checked the new ladder and the timbers, his daily round, and Maren cleaned her tools and laid them out on the bench in the order her father had taught her: largest to smallest, each in its place, each ready to the hand. She had kept that order for five years on the road, in town after town, in rooms that were never hers, and she thought how strange it was that the same small ritual felt different here, in a tower room she had come to know by its creaks and its light, with a man beside her who knew, without being told, which tool she would reach for next.