Chapter 5: Rope

I was at the foundry at six the next morning, before the first shift.

My father sat in his office with the lights off and a mug of coffee gone cold.

"It's real," I said from the doorway. "The card. You've known it's real for three weeks."

He didn't argue.

"Where is she, Dad?"

"I don't know."

"You think she's alive."

"I think somebody wants us to think so."

He put on his glasses, then took them off again.

"Thirty years I've built this place, and I couldn't keep one woman in it."

"Don't make it about you."

"It's about all of us. Listen to me, Bron."

He stood and came around the desk, a big man who had lifted ladles of iron with his own hands.

His fingers on my arm were shaking.

"There are places people go to disappear," he said. "She went to one. The people who live there don't come back the same."

"Then I'll go the way I am."

"Please."

"Dad. I'm going."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he let go and sat down heavily and said nothing else.

I worked all day with that silence in my chest.

At six I drove to Lakewood, to the address Torin had texted me, a brick house with a long lawn running down to the lake.

He opened the door in a grey T-shirt and bare feet.

I'd never seen his feet.

It made me stupidly shy.

"Come in, ma'am."

His living room had been cleared of furniture except a heavy leather chair, and the floor was spread with a blanket.

On the blanket lay a coil of soft red rope.

"Tonight's lesson," he said, "is rope."

"I'm going to tie people up."

"You're going to tie me up. Then I'll show you what it feels like to be tied."

"That seems fair."

"It's a lesson in trust, not fairness." He smiled. "Sit."

He taught me the knots on his own wrists.

First the single column, then the double, how the rope should lie flat and never bite.

"Never over the joint. Never tight enough to cut the blood," he said. "Check the fingers."

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