even a man who has lost a petition will come to see whether the thing he opposed turns out to be true. She did not resent his presence. A trial that cannot bear watching is not a trial, and the clock, she knew, could bear anything now, because it had borne six days already, and the seventh would be like the others: a hand, a dial, a watch, and the truth, plain as noon. She thought, too, about the people below who had initialed the log, day after day, without pay and without praise, and about how a town is not really made of buildings at all, but of such small, repeated acts of attention, and how the clock, in its quiet way, had taught Fox Creek to pay attention together.
At half past eleven she and Soren went down, and the council chairman was already there with the key, and the depot agent was at his post with his watch chain across his waistcoat, and the schoolteacher stood beside the logbook with a pen ready, and the room was quiet in the particular way rooms are quiet when everyone in them is waiting for the same thing. Maren stood before the case, Soren beside her, and the chairman unlocked it, and Maren looked at the movement, at the pendulum swinging its steady arc, at the hands on the dial above, and felt the familiar, unshowy pride of a craftsperson looking at work that has held: not a miracle, just a machine doing what it was made to do, because someone had cleaned it and mended it and told the truth about it, day after day.
The depot agent stepped forward, and compared his watch to the dial, and looked, and looked again, the way a careful man looks when he knows a whole town is watching him look, and then he nodded, and he said, in a voice that carried to the back of the vestibule and out into the street, "True at noon. Seventh day. True."
And the schoolteacher initialed the log, and the depot agent initialed it beside her, and Maren wrote the final entry in her own hand, slowly, so that there would be no mistake: seventh day, true at noon, trial complete. And then she closed the logbook, and the chairman locked the case, and the room exhaled, and outside in the street someone began to clap, and then others joined, not a roar, not a celebration, but the steady, approving sound of a town acknowledging that a thing it had watched for seven days had turned out to be true, and that it had been right to watch.
Fallon did not clap. He stood at the edge of the crowd with his arms folded, and then he turned and walked away down the street, alone, and Maren watched him go, and felt no triumph, only the sober relief of a person whose work has passed its test: it stands, and that is enough, and tomorrow there will be other work. She thought about his newspaper, and the petition, and the rung with its saw marks, and she understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that Fallon had never really been fighting the tower. He had been fighting the idea that a town could decide a thing by looking at evidence, rather than by listening to the loudest voice in it. And the town, for seven days at noon, had looked, and had decided, and that decision would outlast any editorial, because it had been written, one initial at a time, in a book anyone could read.
After the crowd thinned, Soren and Maren went up to the tower room together, and they stood at the window and looked out over Fox Creek, at the street and the shops and the houses, and at the print shop with its board outside, and at the workshop behind Soren's house, where an empty bench waited by a far window with a folded cloth laid out flat upon it, and Maren said, "I will take the bench."
Soren did not turn to look at her. He kept looking out of the window, and he said, "I know."
"You know?" she said, and laughed, because of course he knew, the way people who have worked beside each other for weeks know things before they are said.
"I have known since the meeting," he said. "Not because you told me. Because you stayed for the sixth day when you could have left after the fifth, and because you came to the workshop yesterday and laid your hand on the bench the way a person lays a hand on a thing she has already decided to keep. But I am glad to hear you say it all the same. Some things should be said, even when they are known."