"It is my right hand," she said, on the walk back to the boarding house, her voice flat with the knowledge of what that meant. "I am right-handed. I cannot clean a movement with one hand. I cannot fit a spring with one hand. I cannot do the work I came here to do."
"You cannot do it alone," Soren said. "That is a different sentence, and it is the true one. You have knowledge. I have hands. My hands are not a clockmaker's hands, but they are steady, and they do what they are told, and you can tell them what to do. We will do the work together. That is what we agreed yesterday, before the ladder broke. The ladder has only made the agreement necessary instead of convenient."
She stopped in the middle of the square, and looked at him, and he saw something shift in her face, the way a sky shifts before rain, not into sadness, but into a kind of resolve. "You would do that," she said. "You would lend your hands to my work, and take no credit for it, and have people say the clock was fixed by a woman who could not use her own hand."
"I would," Soren said. "And people will say what they say. The clock will know the truth, and that is enough for me. A clock does not care whose hands fixed it. It cares only that it is fixed right."
They stood there for a moment, in the square, with the tower behind them and the broken rung in his bag and her wrist bound in white cloth, and Soren felt, with a clarity that surprised him, that something had changed between them, not in a sudden way, but in the way a joint changes when it is fitted properly: it no longer wobbles, and it bears weight, and you can trust it. He had caught her when she fell. He would not make more of it than that, because making more of it would be a kind of presumption, and Maren Reed was not a woman to be presumed upon. But he knew, as he walked her to the boarding house door, that he would keep the rung, and that he would look at it again, in better light, and that whatever it told him, he would tell her, because a partnership that begins with a fall should at least begin with the truth.
In the afternoon, Soren built the new ladder. He worked in the square, in the open, where anyone passing could see him, because he wanted the town to see it: a carpenter replacing what the council had let rot, with timber he had bought himself, joint by joint, rung by rung, testing each one as he fitted it. People stopped to watch, as people do when a man works well, and a few of them asked what had happened, and Soren told them plainly, without embroidering, that Miss Reed had fallen that morning and he had caught her, and that her wrist was sprained, and that the old ladder would not be climbed again. He did not mention the rung in his drawer. He did not mention the pale wood or the clean break. Some things, he had learned, should be kept until they can be shown properly, and a rumor started in an afternoon is a thing that grows faster than any ladder.
Mrs. Petersen came out with water for him, and with news: Maren was resting, the doctor had left her with instructions and a sling, and she had asked Mrs. Petersen to tell Mr. Krogh that she would be ready to work in the morning, with his hands and her direction, if he was still willing. Soren sent back word that he was willing, and that the ladder would be finished by nightfall, and that the clock room would be safe to enter by the new way, though he did not yet know how they would manage the fine work with her wrist bound, only that they would manage it, because that was what working together meant: finding the way when the first way was closed.