Chapter Seven – The Pull of the Thread
The golden strand never left Amanda’s bag. She carried it the way others might carry a map, though it wasn’t paper and ink—it was thread, light as air yet heavy with promise.
Sometimes, when Chris drove and the highway stretched straight and dull, Amanda would feel it tug. Not hard, but like a child pulling gently at her sleeve. A nudge, reminding her that the road ahead was more than asphalt and mile markers.
One evening, they stopped by a wide meadow where fireflies blinked like scattered stars. Amanda slipped the golden thread from her pouch and held it up to the fading light. For a heartbeat, she swore she saw it glow. Not just glow—point.
The thread didn’t dangle straight down but angled forward, always forward, toward some unseen place.
Chris leaned against the RV door, sipping from his travel mug. “New project?”
Amanda hesitated. “Something like that.”
She didn’t tell him the truth—that every stitch she made seemed to breathe itself into the world. That a sunflower had grown where her square had been, that twilight birds had flown from her feather, that this thread was pulling them toward something bigger than both of them.
Because how could she explain it when she barely understood herself?
The mystery deepened days later, when they stopped at a small library tucked between cornfields. Amanda loved libraries—always had. The smell of books was comfort, no matter how far from home she roamed.
As she browsed the craft section, a heavy book fell from the top shelf, landing squarely at her feet.
She picked it up, brushing dust from its cover. The Weaver’s Atlas.
It wasn’t like the other books. The pages weren’t filled with patterns for scarves or quilts. Instead, it showed drawings of roads, rivers, forests—and stitches. Golden threads weaving through maps like highways of light.
In the margin of one page, a handwritten note read:
The road listens to those who stitch with truth. Follow where it pulls, and you will find what was lost.
Amanda’s fingers trembled. She glanced around the library, but no one seemed to notice the strange book in her hands.
When she looked back, the golden thread in her pouch had slipped free, draped across the page as though it belonged there.
And suddenly, Amanda realized: she wasn’t the first...
