“He can already do that.”

“He can try,” Benjamin said.

“We need more witnesses, more copies, and somewhere beyond his reach.”

Ruth placed a hand on Caleb’s arm.

“Come north with me,” she said.

“We’ve both spent enough years being moved by other people’s decisions.”

Caleb looked at the lock of hair.

It might belong to a child connected to him by blood, or it might be another object selected to manipulate him.

He could not resolve that uncertainty by returning to a woman who had never given him a truthful choice.

“I won’t go back,” he said.

The words were quiet, but they settled across the kitchen like a door closing.

Amos nodded once.

“Then we plan the next road.”

Sarah began gathering names of reliable contacts along the Pennsylvania route.

Benjamin offered to travel separately with the documents.

Mercy would ask Augusta to remain available to explain what she had witnessed about the births.

Miriam wanted to leave immediately with Ada, but she insisted on sending one final message to another woman still at Hawthorne.

“Who?” Caleb asked.

“Her name is Delia,” Miriam said.

“She carried water to the nursery and heard the doctor speak about the baby.”

The group agreed that Delia’s decision must be her own.

They would not put someone else’s life in danger merely to make their evidence more complete.

Caleb looked out at the road.

There were still men hunting him, and a child whose identity had become a battlefield.

But his refusal was no longer solitary.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Delia’s Decision

Delia Washington worked in the Hawthorne laundry and had lived on the estate since she was a child.

She was thirty-one, with two sons who slept in a small cabin behind the smokehouse.

She had watched Ruth and Hester leave but had remained because her boys were sleeping and the overseer’s patrol had passed the cabin twice that evening.

After their escape, Eleanor questioned everyone in the service quarters.

Delia answered only what she had seen, refusing to repeat rumors about Caleb or the birth.

The colonel’s housekeeper warned her that silence would be interpreted as disloyalty.

“Then I will have to be disloyal,” Delia said.

The housekeeper stared, unused to hearing such a reply.

Delia regretted it immediately, not because it was untrue but because her sons were waiting at home.

That afternoon she found Hester’s message tucked inside a bundle of clean bedding.

It named a meeting place near the old orchard and promised help if she wished to leave.