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.
Even though it was my day off, I showered and dressed to go to work, donning the emotional armor of my favorite dark purple quarter zip shirt with the gym’s logo over my heart. Before I left the apartment, I ate strawberry Pop-Tarts, my version of the breakfast of champions. I sipped coffee on my drive with no music on the radio because all I could think about was what proverbial bomb was about to go off in my life.
For months, I knew my boss, Amy, was going to sell the gym, but she’d never actually said anything to me about who might replace her. But still, as I took the familiar route to work, where I’d invested every ounce of my heart since the day she hired me to manage the place, I had a sinking suspicion that my premonition was about this place that was so dear to me.
My headlights cut a swath through the empty parking lot in front of the low, square building that housed the gym. Instead of pulling around to the back where I normally parked, I decided to come through the front.
I locked the door behind me and punched the security code as it beeped on the wall. The gym was dark when I walked in, which suited me just fine. I’d memorized every inch of the place years earlier, so the weak light of the sunrise was more than enough for me to navigate back to my office.
If I could stay busy enough, with the boxes of merchandise I needed to unpack and display, the training schedule I needed to finalize, and the timecards I needed to finish, maybe I could ignore the bad juju feeling.
I took a sip of my coffee and stretched my free arm over my head with a wince. Went a little too hard in class the day before, and I groaned loudly when my muscles screamed in protest at the movement.
The groan is what had the door to Amy’s office opening, the light of her small corner lamp illuminating the space. The shades were drawn over the glass that looked out over the gym, which I hadn’t noticed earlier. Amy’s head popped out. “Iz. You’re here like, really early.”
I stopped, my heart beginning to tumble over each thudding beat. “Why do you look nervous about the fact that I am?”
I’d worked for her and known her
