"What does it look like?" Evelyn set the toolbox down on the packed earth beside him. Her knees protesting with the familiar sharp complaint she'd learned to mostly ignore. She unlatched the lid and found the bolt cutters exactly where Earl had always kept them right side bottom, handle facing up. The man knew how to organize.
She'd give him that, even from the grave. "Those chains are thick," the man said. "I can see that." "You won't be able to cut them." She looked at him over the top of the toolbox. 74 years of life had given Evelyn Harper a particular kind of look, not mean, not sharp, but absolutely completely unimpressed by people who underestimated her.
Her granddaughter called it the grandmother stare. Her late husband had called it terrifying. "I've been cutting through things people said were impossible my whole life," she said. "You just sit still and let me work." The man opened his mouth, closed it, sat still.
The first chain was wrapped around his wrists, thick iron links, the kind you'd use to secure farm equipment. Evelyn had to position the bolt cutter jaws three times before she found the right angle. Her hands were not young hands, they'd done decades of ranch work, shop work, years of kneading bread and ringing out laundry before machines made that obsolete. But they shook now in a way they hadn't 10 years ago, and she hated that. She bore down with everything she had.
The chain groaned, didn't break. "Try further toward the lock," the man said quietly. "The links are thinner there." She repositioned, bore down again. The snap of breaking metal was the best sound she'd heard in months.
The man sucked in a breath so deep it was almost a sob. He pressed his freed wrists against his chest and Evelyn didn't look at his face because she understood intuitively that he needed a moment to have whatever private feeling was moving through him without an audience. "Thank you," he said once he had himself back together. "I'm not done yet," she replied and moved to the next man. His name, she would learn later, was Ryan Whitman.