At noon they went down, and the council chairman unlocked the case, and the depot agent compared his watch to the dial, and nodded, and initialed the log, and the schoolteacher initialed it beside him, and Maren wrote the entry in her own hand — sixth day, true at noon — and the case was locked again, and the key went back into the chairman's pocket. The crowd in the street was smaller than it had been on meeting day, but it was steady, too, the way true things are steady: the same faces, the same quiet attention, the same willingness to watch a clock and believe what they saw.
That afternoon, with the trial's sixth day secured, Soren took Maren to his workshop, a thing he had not done before, though she had passed it a hundred times. It was a long, low building behind his house, smelling of sawdust and linseed oil, with light coming in through high windows and falling across benches and tools and half-finished work: a chair with one leg yet to fit, a fence section leaning against the wall, a drawer front waiting for its handle. In the corner by the far window there was an empty bench, clear of work, its surface scrubbed clean, and on it nothing at all except a folded cloth, laid out flat, the way you lay out a place for something that has not arrived yet.
Soren did not point to it. He did not need to. He stood in the doorway of his workshop with his hands in his pockets, and he said, in the plain voice he used for work that mattered, "There is room here, if you want it. A bench by a window. Light in the morning. No rent, because a workshop is not a boarding house, and a partner is not a lodger. You would keep your own hours and your own books. The tower work would be part of it, when it is needed, and the rest would be yours."
Maren stood looking at the empty bench, and she felt the whole of the last eight weeks arrive at once, the way a tide arrives: the fall, and the arms that caught her, and the wrist in the sling, and his hands doing her work while her voice guided them, and the rung, and the newspaper, and the logbook, and the meeting, and the locked case, and the key in the chairman's pocket. And underneath all of it, the question the councilman had asked at the meeting, the one she had not answered, because she had not known the answer then: who would keep the clock, once the trial was over?
She did not answer now, either, not at once. She walked to the bench and laid her hand flat on its surface, feeling the wood, smooth and clean, and she looked out of the far window at the street and the tower beyond it, the clock face white against the sky, and she thought about the road, and about the five years of towns that had each been a little kind and none of them home, and about her father's tool case, which had traveled all those miles with her and never once complained about the weight. A bench by a window, she thought. Light in the morning. A tower to keep, and a town that had looked at evidence and chosen to believe it. It was more than she had ever asked a town for, and exactly what she had never let herself ask for, because asking had always felt like staying, and staying had always felt like a risk.
"I will think about it," she said, and Soren nodded, because he was a man who understood that some decisions must be slept on, and that pressing a decision is the fastest way to break it. "Think about it," he said. "The bench will be here. Wood does not hurry."
They worked together for the rest of the afternoon, he at his bench and she at the empty one, doing the small work her wrist allowed: she cleaned and oiled the movement's spare parts, the ones she kept in her father's case for the day they would be needed, and he fitted the chair leg he had been putting off, and the workshop filled with the companionable sounds of two people working in the same room without needing to talk, which is, Maren thought, one of the rarest and best sounds in the world. Once, he handed her a tool without her asking, the right one, and she took it without looking up, and they both smiled at that, because it was the kind of small, unremarkable understanding that takes weeks to build and cannot be faked.