DevyDevine22

There was tragedy, of course. Not long after they had settled into their new home, Meg’s best friend, Stephanie, had gotten into a terrible accident. Struck by a car while she was out running in the early hours of the morning. The driver had never been found, and the paramedics had said Stephanie was lucky to still be alive. Well, almost alive. Stephanie was in a coma, and no one knew when, or if, she would ever wake up.

The accident had very nearly destroyed Meg. Stephanie had been her closest friend since childhood. They’d done everything together. Meg couldn’t imagine a world without her.

The only thing that had kept Meg from falling apart completely was Zach. For some reason, he and Stephanie had never really gotten along, but after the accident, he’d pushed all that aside for Meg. He’d held her through every sob that wracked Meg’s body. He’d stayed up with her during every sleepless night. And he’d gone with her to every bedside visit in Stephanie’s hospital room. He’d even taken turns with Meg, reading all of Stephanie’s favorite books aloud. The doctors had said it was possible she could still hear them and that speaking to Stephanie might help guide her back to consciousness.

The ordeal was more painful than anything Meg had ever been through, and consequently, it had brought her and Zach together in a way she had never experienced with anyone before. They hadn’t even known each other for a year, and yet it felt like they had been together for a lifetime.

Meg really thought she had found The One. She was prepared to spend the rest of her life with him. They were perfect for each other. They could weather any storm together. Nothing could possibly tear them apart.

Or at least that’s what Meg had thought.

Until she found the box.

Living in Miami meant living with constant heat. And living in constant heat meant that any fault in the house’s air conditioning was a problem to be addressed immediately.

She had work off that day while Zach, on the other hand, had a full day at the retirement home, and though she wasn’t needed at the bookstore, she couldn’t stop herself from curling up in bed with her nose in a book. She was so absorbed in her reading that she didn’t notice how unusually warm the room was until a drop of sweat rolled down her nose and landed in the middle of the page.

She blinked, staring at the small soaked spot in confusion. Then she looked up. For the first time in at least an hour, she took stock of her surroundings. Everything seemed normal except for the uncomfortably stuffy temperature. Meg strained her ears and picked up the telltale hum of the air conditioning unit. Well, that was odd.

She marked her place in her book before closing it and getting out of bed. She wandered over to the bedroom vent, tucked almost under the bed itself, and put her hand over the grate. A measly stream of cool air poured out. She frowned. Was something blocking it?

She bent closer and peered through the grate. In what little light penetrated the vent, she thought she could see the silhouette of something in there.

She slipped her fingernails under the edge of the grate and worked to pry it free. Soon enough, she had loosened it enough to jam her fingertips underneath and pull it completely off. She set the grate aside and plunged one hand into the vent. She was half a forearm deep when her fingers brushed against something smooth and angular. She froze, grabbed ahold of it, and pulled.

She sat back at she looked at the small box in her hands. It was plain and made of finished wood. Her heart pounded as she hesitated at the latch. She felt like she had just stumbled across something she wasn’t meant to view.

Finally, steeling herself, she flipped up the latch and opened the box.

Her stomach sank at the sight that greeted her. Sitting on top was a bra. One of her bras. Her nose crinkling in distaste, she pulled it out and set it aside only to uncover more of her things beneath. Socks, underwear, a diary she had kept in high school, a diary she had kept in middle school. There were CD’s Stephanie had burned for her, old postcards addressed to her, even a USB drive she recognized as her own from her college days. She felt like she was going to be sick.

This was Zach’s box. It had to be Zach’s box. In fact, some sixth sense told her it was undoubtedly his. But why? They lived together, there was no need to keep a stash of her things, especially things this… personal. Why this invasion of privacy?

But still, something deep inside told her Zach had started this collection long before they’d started living together. It felt like some strange profile he’d put together, something to understand her.

She thought about how Zach had sometimes seemed to know her better than she knew herself, and pieces of a puzzle she didn’t even know existed started clicking into place.

She kept digging.

At the very bottom corner of the box, tucked away like they were the most secret thing of all, were what appeared to be… clumps of hair. Meg’s stomach turned as she pulled one out and examined it. It was short, brown, and bound by a thin rubber band. She set it aside and began pulling out more clumps, each tied together with another rubber band. As she pulled them out, a sense of unease began to weigh more and more heavily in her gut. There was something about the samples of hair that felt almost sacred, like there was a sense of pride behind each one. They almost felt like— like… Meg stuttered mentally over the word that rose so damningly in her mind.

They almost felt like trophies.

She pulled out another clump of hair and came to a halt. For the first time, the hair she held looked familiar to her. She sat unmoving, staring at it, willing herself to remember where she had seen it before. Then it came to her.

David.

David was one of the bookstore’s regular customers. Or at least he had been. He was a tall, handsome fellow with bright green eyes and ridiculously curly, pale blond locks. She’d recognize them anywhere. She’d spent plenty of time staring at them whenever David came into the store and leaned uncomfortably far over her counter, chatting about increasingly personal subjects with her. Every once in awhile, he’d gain enough nerve to ask her out. She’d politely turned him down each time, but David seemed to be under the impression that she’d change her mind if he just wore her down a bit more.

Once Zach had started coming into the store, he and David had encountered each other only a few times. Zach would walk in to find David bent over Meg’s counter like a vulture. Then he’d look at Meg and Meg would give him a “please help me” look, to which Zach had always obliged with gusto. Without a moment’s hesitation, Zach would barge into the conversation, leaving no room for David’s unwanted advances. After a few minutes of quiet frustration, David would give up on his pursuit for the day and leave in a huff.

After this had happened a couple times, David had stopped coming to the bookstore entirely. Meg assumed that, with Zach in the picture, David had finally accepted defeat. She couldn’t say she missed him or his patronage. But now, as she turned the curly bundle of pale blond hair in her grasp, she began to doubt it was as simple as that. A cold dread began to creep up her spine as his disappearance suddenly felt a lot more nefarious.

Her skin prickling with revulsion, she dropped the bundle of hair into the discard pile and picked up the next one in the box. She froze as it came into sight. The cold dread rose into a white hot rage.

She did not need to think about where she had seen this hair before. She recognized it immediately, knew it as if it were her own. The chestnut brown with the red highlights. It was Stephanie’s.

Meg’s hands shook. Her vision turned scarlet. She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear something apart.

Zach. This was all Zach. Zach had done this. He had never really liked Stephanie. Of course, he had done this. He had been the one to hit Stephanie with his car. He had been the one to put her in this awful coma. This was a fact that Meg now knew in her very soul.

She wanted to fling the box away. Destroy it and everything inside. She wanted to run all the way to Zach’s place of work and beat him with her fists until there was nothing left.

But Meg did neither of these things. Instead, she reverently set Stephanie’s hair down next to David’s and reached for the box of horrors once more. There was still more inside and she knew she had to see this through until the end.

There were only two clumps of hair left, both blond and both similar enough to Meg’s own hair color and texture that, for a brief moment of terror, she thought they belonged to her. But then, no, they were most definitely not hers. That one was too dark and the other one was too curly. Unlike the other samples of hair, these two were not held together with a rubber band. Instead, they had each been tied up with a beautiful bow of ribbon, one a deep, midnight blue and the other a sleek, crimson red.

Meg stared at them, trying to figure them out. There was something special about these two samples, that much was clear. But what?

Once more, she felt the pieces of this new puzzle clicking together, and that’s when she knew.

Zach had mentioned before that he’d been in previous relationships. In fact, he’d been in two rather serious ones, but whenever Meg had asked about his exes, he’d clammed up. All she knew about them was that things had been perfect… until they weren’t.

“They just changed,” he’d told her simply. “And I knew that we’d never be able to work things out.”

And that was that.

Meg had tried not to pry. Zach had always been so quiet about his past, and she had never pushed him to say more than he was comfortable with. From what little she’d heard, it didn’t seem like the kind of stuff someone would want to relive. But now she wished she hadn’t been so understanding. She wished she had squeezed every last detail out of him.

She looked down at the hair in her hands again. This was all that remained of those two mysterious exes now, she was certain of it. And as she had this thought, another certainty settled over her, one that made her head spin and her stomach twist into knots.

She was next.

Meg sat unmoving for a long while, clutching the remains of her predecessors. Then, like a switch, she came back to life. Mechanically, she began putting everything back in the box, taking extra care to arrange it just as she had found it. She closed it, latched it tight, and slid it back into the open vent. She took time to make sure the box was positioned so the air flow was unblocked, then she replaced the grate, climbed back into bed, and pretended the whole thing had never happened.