Page 87 of Unless It's You
“Get in. Sit.” I duck back inside the car, hoping he follows direction. When the car door clicks open and he slides in, I’m already messing with the old, peeling tape. With a loud rip, I free the flaps of the box and they spring open, his mom’s handwriting no longer visible.
Ethan doesn’t move, so I reach in. A blue baby onesie is at the very top, with a big train on the front and the wordsChoo Choo. I pick it up and show it to Ethan.
“Aw. Sweet.” Hope surges in me. Please, let the box be filled with thoughtful moments from Ethan’s childhood.Give him this, at least.Give him some peace with the memory of his mother.
He looks at the onesie, then back down at the box. Clearly, the man isn’t going to touch it, so I lay the tiny clothing on my lap and reach back in.
The next item is a single piece of paper, stiff with age. It’s a child’s colorful drawing of a mountain, with a woman holding the hand of a small boy at the very top. The clouds are shaped like puffy hearts and the mountain is gray and green and rocky. It’s quite good, actually. The corner saysEthan, 10,in cute, loopy handwriting.
I smile at him. “Your artwork, Leonardo?”
Ethan makes a murmuring sound, staring at the drawing, but not touching it.
“That was after Mum took me to Skye. I can’t believe she saved it. I can’t believe she saved anything.”
“Well, she did.” I carefully place the paper on top of the onesie and pull out an old picture with bent edges. It’s of a baby sitting on a young woman’s lap. I hand it to Ethan, and this time, he takes it.
He draws in a shaky breath, and I imagine he’s overcome with emotion. Thank the universe that his mother is pulling through for him.
But next in the box is a layer of yellowing paperback novels, the kind sold in grocery stores with old-school romance covers. Long-haired, shirtless men holding half-dressed women with their heads thrown back.
“Books. Did you read these together?” I pile a few on my lap, briefly showing him the covers. But I think I already know the answer.
“No.” Ethan’s one-word answer comes out like a bark. “They’re just trashy old books.”
Well, shit.
“What else is in there?”
I peer into the box, pushing aside a few more books, furrowing my brows at what I see. I fish out a pile of t-shirts and drop them in my lap, holding them up one-by-one.
“Queen.” Another. “Kiss.” One more. “Def Leppard. That’s it. Mean anything to you?”
“They belong to one of her exes. She dated a guy for two or three years when I was little. He was a total arsehole and would yell at her all the time. Then he left her, thank fuck.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan.” My heart pulses for him. For what he had to endure.
“It was after that we went to Skye. She wanted to change, but she failed, and things went back to our shite normal.”
“Why would she put them in this box? Did they mean something more?”
“They meannothingto me. Just a reminder of how she chose her loser boyfriends over me.”
Ethan lunges and turns the entire box over, dumping the few items left onto the seat and dropping the box on the floor of the car. He doesn’t reach for anything, just stares like it’s a bomb about to detonate.
I touch a few loose papers with handwritten scribbles and move them around. With a jolt of hope, I pick up one of the pages and skim. When I catch the phrasesyour heavenly bodyandthe most beautiful woman in the worldandwe should run away from everything together,I stop reading.
“Oh,” I say. “I think they’re letters from one of your mom’s boyfriends.”
He snarls and looks out the window. “Of course they are.”
“There’s one more thing. Looks like a journal?” I pick up the gray bound notebook from the floor by my feet, where it landed when he dumped the box. I open the journal and there’s writing on the first two pages, and then it’s blank.
Ethan looks over at me.
“It’s mostly blank. There’s a few?—”
“Toss it. Please.”
