Toward evening, when the ladder stood finished and true against the tower wall, its new pine smelling clean in the summer air, Soren went to the boarding house and knocked at Maren's door, and she called him in, and he found her sitting by the window with her bound wrist in her lap and her father's tool case open on the table, the springs laid out in a row like small bright promises. She looked tired, and her face was still pale, but her eyes were clear, and she was studying the springs the way a general studies maps before a battle.
"I have been thinking," she said, without preamble, because Maren Reed was not a woman who wasted words on weather when there was work to discuss, "about how we do this. I cannot hold a screwdriver steady with my right hand, and I cannot fit a spring with my left. But I can see, and I can speak, and I can tell your hands what to do, if you will let me. It will be slower than working alone. It will require patience from both of us. And people will say things, because people always say things when a woman directs and a man obeys, as if direction were not work."
"Let them say things," Soren said. "I have been in this town ten years, and I have learned that people say things about everything, and that the things they say matter less than the things that stand. A tower stands. A clock runs. Those are the things that matter."
She nodded, and for a moment her composure wavered, and he saw, beneath the precise clockmaker, the young woman who had fallen that morning and who had been frightened, and who was still frightened, though she would not say so. "My father," she said quietly, "used to say that a clockmaker's hands are her fortune, and that she must guard them the way other people guard money. I have guarded mine for five years, since he died, and in one morning I have lost the use of one of them. I am afraid, Mr. Krogh, that I will be useless here, and that Fox Creek will decide it hired the wrong person."
Soren sat down across from her, slowly. "Miss Reed," he said, "you were hired to fix a clock, not to prove that you can fix it alone. The town hired your knowledge, not your hands alone. And knowledge does not sprain. It sits in your head, where no fall can reach it, and it tells my hands what to do, and my hands are glad to be told by someone who knows. That is not uselessness. That is partnership, and partnership is older than either of us, and stronger than any ladder."
She looked at him for a long moment, and then she smiled, a real smile this time, and she said, "Then tomorrow we begin. You will be my hands, and I will be your eyes, and between us we will have one whole clockmaker. It is a strange arrangement, but I have had stranger, and none of them worked as well as the strange ones sometimes do."
He left her then, with the springs shining on the table and the evening light coming through the window, and he walked home through the square feeling something he had not felt in a long time, something like purpose with a second person in it, which is a different thing from purpose alone. He had come to America ten years ago with nothing but tools and a name, and he had built a life one board at a time, and he had grown used to working alone, because alone was safe, and alone did not disappoint. But alone, he was beginning to understand, was also a kind of silence, like a stopped clock, and a man can grow so used to silence that he forgets what a ticking room sounds like. Maren Reed, with her bound wrist and her father's case and her precise way of speaking, had brought a ticking back into his workshop, and he did not intend to let it stop.
That night, in his workshop, with the new pine stacked beside him and the broken rung on his bench under the lamp, Soren looked at the break again, and it still puzzled him, the pale wood and the clean line, and he thought about the council, and about the men who wanted the tower gone, and about the fact that he could not yet say whether the ladder had simply failed or had been failed on purpose.