Daniel had not been told he was going anywhere.

Two overseers entered the workshop and ordered him outside.

Thomas was waiting near the stable with a horse whose harness had not been fastened properly.

He looked at Daniel once, and the terror in his eyes answered every question.

Richard emerged carrying a folded paper and said he had sold Daniel to a buyer moving enslaved workers south.

The Colonel called the decision an economic necessity.

Daniel knew better.

Catherine stood at an upstairs window with one hand against the curtain.

She did not intervene.

Daniel asked whether he could take his mother’s small wooden box from the cabin.

One overseer laughed and told him he no longer had a cabin.

Thomas stepped forward with the box already hidden inside a burlap sack.

He had guessed what was coming and salvaged it before the doors were locked.

The overseer struck the sack with his boot but did not notice its contents.

Daniel held Thomas’s gaze as long as he could.

No words passed between them.

He climbed into the wagon with three other men whose names he did not yet know.

The gates swung outward, and Blackwood Manor disappeared behind the trees before dawn.

The journey lasted twelve days.

Daniel counted them by the changing sound of the wheels as the wagon crossed roads of clay, gravel, and broken stone.

A guard kept the men under watch and spoke of them as cargo whenever he negotiated at an inn.

Daniel learned the names of his companions during the brief moments when the guard slept.

They were Isaac, who had worked in a cooperage, Benjamin, who missed a wife outside Richmond, and young Eli, who still expected someone from his family to appear at every crossroads.

No one told Eli that his hope was foolish.

Hope was often the only thing the guards had not searched for at departure.

Daniel carried the wooden box beneath his coat after Thomas slipped it to him at the first stop.

Inside were three buttons, a thimble that had belonged to his mother, and a folded scrap bearing a hymn she once taught him.

There was no money and no map.

Still, touching the box helped him remember that his life had started before Catherine and could continue after her.

At a roadside barn, he used a splinter of charcoal to mark the names of towns on the underside of its lid.

If he ever escaped, he wanted to know how far the wagon had traveled.