Elijah walked toward the kitchen, but he heard Catherine whisper when Richard turned away.
“Was she there?” Elijah did not look back.
He touched the side of his tool bag once.
Mrs.
Fenwick saw the gesture and understood.
She followed him downstairs without another word.
Chapter 21: The First Safe Night
The wagon reached Miriam’s workshop long after midnight.
Lydia stepped down carefully, protecting Thomas from a splintered wheel rim.
Rebecca waited in the doorway with a lamp, and for a moment neither woman spoke.
They had last seen each other at a Christmas gathering before Lydia disappeared.
Rebecca remembered a young woman who refused to accept comforting lies.
The person before her had lines around her mouth and scars on her wrists, but the same fierce attention remained in her eyes.
“You came,” Lydia said.
Rebecca embraced her carefully, mindful of the injured shoulder.
“I should have come years ago,” she answered.
Miriam gave Thomas bread soaked in broth and found a blanket that did not smell of storage.
The boy would not release Lydia’s hand until he had finished eating.
Lydia explained that Thomas’s mother had been taken from a road near the Maryland border and separated from him after they were seized.
He remembered the name Annie Wells, but not the town.
Miriam wrote the name in her account book and asked if he wanted to sleep in the loft or beside the kitchen fire.
He chose the fire because he could see the door.
Nobody argued.
They made a bed there and left a lantern burning low.
Alden arrived before dawn and read the ledger beneath the workshop’s shutters.
The first pages described payments for freight and private security.
Farther in were columns of names, ages, origins, and false claims of ownership.
Several entries had been overwritten, but the pressure of the original writing remained visible in the paper.
Alden knew enough to recognize that some entries contradicted public freedom records he had obtained for another case.
Lydia identified a symbol used whenever a person resisted transport or demanded a hearing.
“That mark means they were considered trouble,” she said.
“Those were the people most likely to disappear.”
Rebecca asked why Lydia had remained involved after escaping the first holding house.
Lydia answered without hesitation.
“Because I saw a little girl named Alice get sent away while her mother stood behind a locked door.” She had found shelter once but returned to help others because a single escape did not end the system that trapped them.
