Chapter 1: The Stranger | The Lock

Note: This is the first installment of The Lock, an unfinished fantasy novel I originally started serializing on Wattpad. I’m going to start posting chapters of the book here on Substack, and I’ll be finishing the book soon. Hope you enjoy it!

Lena

Damn you, Jason.

Lena was fuming. Her manager, Jason, had scheduled her for a closing shift. He'd also scheduled her to open the next morning. So here she was at nearly eleven at night, mopping the floor she'd be returning to in the morning with less than five hours of sleep.

It wasn't the first time he'd done this, either. Jason enjoyed wielding his managerial power, but the fact was he'd been in her shoes less than a year earlier. In fact, he and Lena had been friends once, when they'd both been mere baristas. But Jason had been promoted, much to Lena's bafflement, and the power had gone to his head. Lately it seemed like he was trying to come up with new ways to ruin her life.

Whatever. There was nothing she could do about it — she needed this job, desperately, and quitting wasn't an option — so she took a minute to breathe deeply and center herself. She thought back to what her instructor had told her at a meditation retreat she'd attended last summer: She didn't control her negative thoughts and emotions; they controlled her.

She closed her eyes and imagined herself stuffing all her anger toward Jason into a black balloon. When it was completely filled, looking like it might burst, she let it go and watched it float off into the sky until it disappeared.

She opened her eyes. She was still pissed at Jason, but she felt a little calmer. She finished mopping the floor and took the mop bucket into the back to dump it. She was done for the night - finally. She hung her apron on the wall, grabbed her purse and swung the strap around her shoulder, and made for the door.

Before reaching for the handle, she caught sight of a homeless man standing outside. She paused. She didn't like stereotyping the homeless, but there didn't appear to be anyone else around and it made her nervous to leave the cafe by herself.

She took a seat by the window and watched him. Maybe he'd go away in a minute or two. She rummaged through her purse until she found a canister of pepper spray. If he didn't leave soon, she'd have it at the ready when she left.

The man looked to be in his mid to late twenties, although he may have appeared older than he was on account of his unkempt hair and beard. He wore faded, baggy jeans and an old, black bomber jacket. A black beanie and a pair of thin cotton gloves were his only other protection against the chill of the night.

Lena watched as he shuffled over to the fence on the other side of the pedestrian bridge that connected downtown Seattle to the ferry terminal. He plunged a hand into his jacket pocket and pulled something out of it, although Lena couldn't see what it was.

She could guess, though. She suspected he'd just retrieved a key.

Much like the Pont des Arts in Paris, the bridge leading to the Seattle ferry had become a magnet for lovebirds eager to symbolize their affection for each other by securing a padlock to the bridge's chain link fence. There were nowhere near as many locks on the Seattle bridge as the one in Paris, but there were enough of them to turn the heads of passersby.

Having worked at a cafe facing the fence for more than two years, Lena had seen countless couples add their locks to the collection. She'd even added one herself, almost a year ago, with her boyfriend — ex-boyfriend, now — Brett. A lock hadn't been enough to salvage their particular relationship. The lock was still up there, though; they'd chucked the key off the side of the bridge, because, why not? They thought their love would last forever.

Most people ditched their keys, actually, which is why it was so odd that this man had held on to his. Instead of thinking of him as a threat, she was beginning to wonder who he was as a man. Had he loved someone once? Was it before or after he'd become homeless? And why was he here now, presumably to remove the lock that symbolized his love? Had his lover died? Maybe, as had happened between Lena and Brett, it was simply the love itself that had died.

She felt like a voyeur as she spied on him, but she couldn't help herself. Her eyes wide, she watched, fascinated, as he raised his hands toward one of the locks. With his back blocking her view, all Lena could tell was that he was fiddling with the mechanism, but she assumed he was inserting his key.

Sure enough, the lock clicked open. He plucked it off the chain link and held it in his hands a moment, staring down at it as if it were some mystical relic rather than a common tool one could procure at any hardware store. Finally, he dropped it into his pocket.

Lena expected him to walk away. He seemed to have gotten what he'd come for, after all.

Instead, to Lena's bewilderment, the man pushed on the fence. A rectangular section, maybe five feet wide by four feet tall, swung outward as if hinged like a door. The man glanced to his left and right. He paused a moment, then climbed through the opening and disappeared.