"Just to see if the mechanism still holds," she had whispered to herself. Click.

As Martha unlocked the cuffs, Eleanor felt the blood return to her wrists. She rubbed the faint red marks, but as she headed downstairs, she didn't feel like she had been trapped. For one hour, the handcuffs hadn't held her back—they had held her still.

The iron of the antique handcuffs felt surprisingly cool against Eleanor’s wrists, a sharp contrast to the humid air of the attic. At sixty-five, she hadn’t expected her Tuesday afternoon to involve being "detained" by a piece of her own family history.

The sound was satisfyingly definitive. The problem wasn't the cuffs; it was the key. It sat on the workbench three feet away—just out of reach of her tethered hands.

"Eleanor? Are you up there? You missed our tea time," called Martha, her neighbor.