Free The One Girl by Laurel Curtis Page A

my eyes scanned, they stopped on a box that I hadn’t thought about in years. My parents’ most treasured belongings. I reached up, grabbed the box, pulled it down, and headed into my bedroom with it. Setting it down on the bed, I opened the lid and looked inside. On top was my parent’s wedding picture, followed by a recent (recent before their deaths, anyway) picture of them. They looked just as happy, if not happier, in the second picture as they did the day they got married.
    Looking at the pictures like this, I also noticed how young they were. They had been together such a long time, that it had often been easy to forget just how young they still were at the time of their deaths.
    I brushed the picture of my mom’s cheek with my thumb, took in her blue-green eyes that matched mine, and then set the pictures aside. Next, I pulled out my dad’s wallet and rifled through it. It had pictures of Jenny and I from when we were kids and a mixture of business cards and other miscellaneous scraps of paper.
    I shuffled through them quickly, but then stopped when something caught my eye. A green, folded sticky note with ‘Jenny Winniekins’ and a phone number I didn’t recognize was mixed in with the business cards, and it was close to the top of the stack like maybe he had put it in there right before he went to Nashville.
    I picked up my phone from the nightstand and dialed the number on the paper. Surprisingly, it rang four times and then clicked over to a voicemail box. “Hey, you’ve reached Jenny. Leave your name, number, and a message, and I’ll get back to you!”
    I dropped the phone on the bed like it was a poisonous snake and stepped away from it. I hadn’t heard Jenny’s voice in so long and hearing it now, knowing what had happened to her, made my stomach dip and churn to the point where I thought I might be sick.
    Not to mention, I had expected the number to be disconnected or belong to someone else at this point. I hadn’t actually expected to hear her voice, a voice that had matured a few years since I’d heard it last, talking back to me like she wasn’t dead just like my parents.
    Quickly putting the contents of the wallet back in and placing it back in the box, I dug around until I found what I had intended to look for when I took the box down. My hand searched until my fingers closed around the velvety softness of the small square box I was looking for. I pulled it out, popped it open, and let my eyes land on the beautiful, round, 1.25 carat diamond of my mother’s engagement ring.
    I suppose it would have gone to Jenny one day, but since that wasn’t an option, I couldn’t think of a better place for it to go than on Talie’s left ring finger.
    It was currently waiting for a ring, and this one was perfect. It was simple and classy, but big enough to fit her big personality. Talie would also love that it was a family ring, and she would love that it would be a way to keep her connected to Jenny.
    I tucked the ring into my pocket because I knew I wanted give it to her as soon as possible. We hadn’t known each other that long, but I honestly couldn’t wait to see my ring on her finger. Somehow, I had known it was right the moment I met her.
    They say when you know, you know, but I never believed it. I had never felt anything close to right with another woman, so I figured it was probably garbage. I figured if I didn’t feel right with any of the large number of perfectly good women I’d been through, it wasn’t happening. Then I met Talie. To say she changed things would be a vast understatement.
    I popped the now empty jewelry box closed, put it back in the box of my parents’ belongings, and closed the lid. Picking it up, I carried it back into the closet and put it back where it came from.
    Back on track, I pulled a gray t-shirt off of my shelf and pulled it over my head, shoving my arms through the holes simultaneously.
    I brushed my hand through my hair a few times, flicked out the