There is a particular quality to the day after a unanimous vote. It is not celebration, exactly, though the Evening Post gave it their best effort with a headline in type large enough to read from across the river. It is not relief, either, though one suspects Deputy Treasurer Whitford slept better on Monday night than she has in some weeks.

It is something quieter. A settling. The sound a building makes when the wind drops.

On Monday, eleven councillors voted aye, and the gallery erupted, and copper fell, and bond yields moved, and the diplomatic correspondents reported progress, and the Bramblegate Market reopened, and Mrs Vesely sold fish. It was, by any reckoning, the most consequential day this city has witnessed in years.

On Tuesday, the number 4 tram was three minutes late.

I do not mention this as criticism of the Transit Authority, which operates, as ever, with the beleaguered competence of an institution asked to do too much with rolling stock that remembers the last century. I mention it because it is the kind of fact that reasserts itself the morning after history happens. The vote was unanimous. The tram was late. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other.

There is a temptation, on mornings like this, to believe that the great questions have been settled. The tramway will be built. The corridor will be opened. The crisis will pass. One can almost hear it in the way the bond traders talk — “a sustained repricing,” they say, as though the future has been purchased outright and delivery is merely a matter of scheduling.

But the geological survey has not yet begun. The fourth session has not yet convened. The Lady Maren has not yet come home. And in a condemned building on Harker Street, a demolition man has found a satchel of letters from 1863, and is wondering what to do with them.

The city is always doing several things at once. It votes and it grieves and it builds and it waits. It sends diplomats to quiet rooms and fishing boats to open water and demolition crews to old buildings and schoolteachers to rehearsals. It does all of these things on the same Tuesday, and none of them pauses for the others.

I walked along the Ashwater this morning, before the ferry started. The river was high and brown from last week’s rain, moving with the unhurried confidence of something that has been flowing through this city since long before anyone thought to build a bridge over it. Somewhere beneath my feet, if Pella Strand is correct, there is a conduit that has been carrying water since 1782 — water that has been flowing for two hundred and forty-four years without anyone knowing it was there.

That is the thing about cities. They contain more than they know. They build over their own history, and the history keeps flowing underneath, and every now and then someone takes a crowbar to a wall and discovers that the past has been waiting patiently for someone to notice.

The tramway will be built. I believe that. The diplomatic framework will hold, or it will not. The Bellvue will raise its sixty-two thousand florins, or it will not. The Lady Maren will come home, or she will not. None of these outcomes is certain, and certainty is not what Tuesday mornings are for.

Tuesday mornings are for the small business of continuing. For filling the kettle, and catching the late tram, and reading the letters that were hidden behind a wall for a hundred and sixty years, and wondering what the man who wrote them was thinking about on the morning after his own great decisions.

I suspect he was thinking about the price of fabric and whether the quays would be finished on time. The quiet between votes is always filled with the same things: work, and waiting, and the hope that what was decided yesterday will hold.

The tram arrived. I got on. The river kept flowing.