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Chapter Two
Isabel
No one in my life knew about it, but my favorite possession in the entire world was a metal box. My Nan—my half-brother Logan’s mom—gave it to me when I turned ten, and she told me it was the best way to keep important things safe. Things I wasn’t ready to share with anyone else or wanted to make sure were taken care of. It came right after a screaming match with Molly because she’d found my diary and made fun of me for something I’d written about a boy in my class. A place to lock things up from my sister’s prying eyes sounded like the best possible gift.
It was sleek and black, a little beat up around the edges, and had a thick lock that had grown dull with age. Along the heavy metal top was a red stripe, and I always liked that surprising pop of bright color. The rest of the box was so forbidding, but that little bit of color gave it personality.
She told me it was vintage, that they didn’t make lockboxes like it anymore. Stamped into the metal along the bottom was 43 Bond, not that I even really knew what that meant.
Over the years, I was very selective of what I put into that box. There were a few keepsakes, some that brought happy memories, and some that served as an important reminder, good or bad.
A silver locket Molly bought me for my eleventh birthday after saving her money for months because she knew I wanted it. I used to look at it when I wanted to remember why my older sister was, in fact, not the bane of my existence.
A ribbon from my senior prom corsage. The date had been forgettable, but his sweaty man-child hands trying to figure out what to do with me were … not. That guy—just like the few others who’d made the sad attempts to date me as I stretched my long legs into adulthood—couldn’t carry a conversation if it was strapped to his back. That one came out of the box if I ever needed to remember why it was easier to say no.
A bracelet our mom gave me just a few weeks before she left us on our brother’s front porch. I’d never worn it. Usually, that one stayed tucked way the hell back because even the smallest glimpse of that delicate silver pattern had my heart racing. People knew when they’re going to leave you. The bracelet didn’t need to come out of the box in order to remind me of that.
Some of the items weren’t that maudlin, don’t worry.
The first pair of hand wraps from the kickboxing gym that had been my second home, my life, since I started working there at eighteen. I was fourteen the first time I wore them.
Some were silly, or made me feel silly, which was a little different. I didn’t usually pull those out to study them. But I was getting there. All of the storytelling had a point, I promise.
As I got older, I realized the box—strong and secure and protective—was a fitting symbol for me.
How sexy, right?
Isabel Ward, the human lockbox.
I was tough and strong. Everything important stayed safe where no one could touch or ruin it. There was space inside me for a lot more, but the older I got, the less opportunity there was for the lid to be opened.
To be honest, I didn’t even really try, which was fine. Nothing that required pity or embarrassment. I liked keeping my lid locked, if you know what I mean. No man had pried that baby open yet, and I was perfectly, one-hundred-percent okay with that.
Not that I judged people who … let someone open their box with frequency; this was just a better choice for me. Safer. Letting it stay closed was better than having it be mishandled.
The box, stored safely in the spare unused room at Logan and his wife Paige’s house, was something I hadn’t touched in a long time. Hadn’t added anything to it since I was eighteen.
But for some reason, I thought about the box and the silly items I didn’t usually look at, before going to bed.
I wasn’t claiming to be psychic or anything. But a few times in my life, I’d fought sleep for hours, consumed with the overwhelming urge to look at something in that box. Urge wasn’t even the right word. It was so strong, my legs jittered and my fingers twitched restlessly.
The night before my mom left us, I swear to you on my Nan’s grave (which I only did when I really, really meant something), I felt that box calling to me like it was alive. At that time, it was in the back of my closet where my nosy-ass sisters couldn’t find it, and I pulled it out while the sky was dark. There wasn’t as much in it back then, so it didn’t take me long to rifle through the contents. Checking that the bracelet was still there, it helped, and I’d been able to sleep.
What an omen that turned out to be.
A couple of years later, it happened again. A different home housed me and the box—the one Logan had bought for our new makeshift family. Something made me open it again, and I studied a picture that I’d tucked inside. It was the five of us. My sisters, Molly, Lia, and Claire, and then Logan. Our protector, the parent who wasn’t a parent, the one who stepped in and righted our world when my mom had turned it upside down.
The next day, he brought Paige home and introduced her as his future wife. This time, the change was good. The red-haired tornado, someone I’d take a bullet for, became the mother I always wanted.
That was the last time it happened.
Until now.
I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to visualize the box that I hadn’t opened in probably seven years. I cataloged everything inside it, trying to decipher what it meant. What change might be on the horizon?
Lemme tell you. Women who likened themselves to metal lockboxes did not like change. We hated change.
It was terrifying, like standing outside knowing that a storm was bearing down on you, but you hadn’t yet felt the first fat raindrop.
