After a while Soren set down his work and talked, in his practical way, about what keeping the tower would actually mean, week by week, now that the trial had proved the clock could be trusted. The movement would need winding on the same day each week, and oiling at the change of each season, and the pendulum's swing checked against the depot agent's watch at every noon he was present, not as a trial any longer but as a habit. The timbers would need his inspection each spring and autumn, and the ladder would need replacing rung by rung before wear became weakness, and both kinds of keeping would be written in the town's book, so that no future caretaker would have to guess what had been done. Maren listened, and asked questions the way she always asked them, precisely and without flattery: how often did the dust gather in the movement, and did the summer heat swell the case door, and had anyone ever kept a record of the tower's repairs before, or had it all lived in men's memories until the memories retired? Soren answered each question plainly, and where he did not know, he said so, and Maren thought that a partnership built on plain answers was rarer than she had ever allowed herself to believe. Then she said, thinking aloud the way she did when a plan was forming, that the trial log should not end with the trial. Let it become the tower's keeping log, she said, open in the vestibule for anyone to read, with each week's winding and each season's oiling entered in it, so that the town would never again have to take the clock's truth on faith. Soren nodded, slowly, the way a man nods when a good joint has just been fitted and he can see that it will hold. "A log anyone can read," he said. "Yes. That is how you keep a town honest about its time."
In the evening she walked back to her lodging alone, and sat at her small table with her father's tool case open beside her, thinking about the bench, and the tower, and the seventh day, which would come tomorrow at noon, and what she would do the day after that, which no trial and no council could decide for her. She thought about her father, who had taught her that a clock does not lie and does not flatter, and she wondered what he would have said about a bench by a window in Fox Creek, and about a Danish carpenter who handed her the right tool without being asked. She thought he would have said: try it. A bench is not a chain. Work is not a cage. And time, kept together, is worth more than time counted alone.
She slept, and dreamed of nothing in particular, which was itself a kind of peace, and woke to the seventh morning with the light coming in gold through her window, her wrist steady, and her mind made up in the quiet way minds are made up when given room to settle: she would stay. Not because she had nowhere else to go — the road was still there — but because Fox Creek had given her something the road never had: a place where her work was counted, and a partner who counted it with her, and a tower whose time she had helped make true. She would stay, and she would keep the clock, and she would take the bench by the window, and whatever came after that would come in its own time, one noon at a time.
The seventh day gathered the way seventh days gather when a town has been watching: slowly at first, and then all at once. By eleven the street below the town hall was full, fuller than it had been since the meeting, and Maren, looking out of the tower window, saw faces she knew and faces she was still learning: the miller's wife with her daughter beside her, the farrier wiping his hands on his apron, the boarding-house keeper with her shawl pulled close against the morning chill, the old man who swept the street leaning on his broom as if it were a staff of office, and children perched on the town hall steps, swinging their legs, waiting for noon the way children wait for anything promised — impatiently, and with complete faith that it will come. And she saw Fallon, too, standing at the edge of the crowd with his arms folded, watching, because