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The key to the basement door had been in his grandfather's effects for sixteen years, wrapped in oilcloth with a note that said simply "When you're ready." Ethan Cross had never been ready, had spent those years avoiding Millbrook and the rusted ironworks where his grandfather Walter had built a life from metal and fire and stubborn refusal to quit when easier men would have walked away. But now his eight-year-old daughter Mara needed a place to live that didn't cost rent he couldn't pay, and the ironworks was the only property he owned, even if it was probably worth less than the back taxes accumulated while he'd stayed away pretending his past didn't exist.

Ethan stood in the gravel lot where delivery trucks used to load finished ironwork, looking at the building that had defined his grandfather's life and that Ethan had fled the moment he turned eighteen. The ironworks was three stories of industrial brick, its windows either broken or so filthy that sunlight barely penetrated, its loading dock sagging from years of neglect. Walter Cross had operated this facility from 1952 until his death in 2008, crafting custom ironwork for buildings and bridges and installations across three states, employing twenty people at the operation's peak and maintaining quality standards that made his work legendary among people who understood the difference between metal bent quickly and metal shaped properly.

Ethan had grown up in this building, had learned to weld before he learned algebra, had spent summers working alongside men who'd dedicated their lives to Walter's exacting vision of what ironwork should be. But he'd also watched his grandfather pour everything into the business while the industry changed around him, watched cheap imported metal undercut prices Walter couldn't match, watched the workforce shrink from twenty to ten to five to just Walter alone in his final years, refusing to close even when keeping the doors open meant working sixteen-hour days at seventy-five years old.

When Walter died of a heart attack at his workbench in 2008, Ethan had been twenty-two and working construction in Tennessee, had come back for the funeral and left again within three days, unable to face the building that had consumed his grandfather and that Ethan associated with nothing but grinding work and the slow death of an industry that didn't value craft anymore. He'd ignored the lawyer's letters about the property transfer, had let the ironworks sit abandoned for sixteen years while he built a life elsewhere—a life that had included marriage to Sarah, Mara's birth, steady work until the construction company folded, Sarah's death in a car accident two years ago, and the slow slide into financial instability that had brought him back to the one asset he'd been avoiding since his grandfather died.