Bitter Truth (Hawthorne Vines #1)

Chapter One

MURPHY

The sign for Rosewood streaks by, the lights from my car illuminating it for just a moment before it disappears behind me with the fading sunlight.

Twenty more minutes until I’m home.

I sigh, wishing not for the first time that things were different.

That this wasn’t the way things in my life were falling together.

Or, I guess, falling apart.

The eight-hour drive from Venice Beach hasn’t been that bad, but once I crossed the bridge taking me out of San Francisco and into Napa, it felt like time sped up. The drive I had earlier wished would pass more quickly now feels like it’s coming to an end far too soon.

Because the fact I’m heading back to my hometown is finally starting to sink in, and I wish I could slow time for a little while. Just long enough to figure out … well, to figure out a lot of things.

What I’m going to say.

What I’m going to do.

But most importantly, how I’m going to cope with the aftermath of what happened back in LA and what it means for my life.

I take the next exit and catch myself grinding my teeth, my jaw flexing with the anxiety that overwhelms me with each passing moment.

As I leave the freeway and begin the final stretch out into the country, everything I see is a reminder of why I left. All the reasons I couldn’t ever imagine a life here beyond the one forced on me as a child, when I had no choice about where to live and what to do.

The truth is that I hated Rosewood the moment we arrived. I was just four years old when my father, my brothers, and I showed up with a carload of belongings and a truckload of emotional baggage.

I take a deep breath and let it out long and slow, hoping it will help ease the anxious energy beginning to build in my chest.

It doesn’t help.

And then I make the turn onto Main Street, crossing the short stretch of downtown. Rosewood has one of those quaint downtown areas that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. It’s a stretch of road that hosts a bar, a restaurant, a café, a coffee shop, a bakery, and of course, little shops filled to the brim with every wine-related tchotchke a tourist might desire.

In the years since I left, I’ve come to realize just how different Rosewood is from so many other places. Though I haven’t yet decided whether that’s a good or a bad thing.

It’s particularly different from Venice Beach and Santa Monica, my stomping grounds when I moved to Southern California. People everywhere, beachy weather, tattoo parlors, and weed shops. The grunge and grit of the place make it feel like a town that brought out the wild, slightly unhinged parts of people. The social niceties of small-town life wouldn’t be a blip in the minds of anyone who stuck around there long enough.

Rosewood is … the exact opposite. Clean and quaint and perfect in a way that is also absolutely infuriating.

Which is why the idea of being back sits in my belly like a stomach bug, a nauseating feeling that has me cracking my window for a little fresh air as I come to a stop at the end of the street. The familiar smells of wine country—damp earth and grapevine—flood my senses.

Memories from my childhood rush in, some bad, some good. Like the shared stresses of a bad year for the grapes, or seeing my father, covered in debris and sweat in the middle of the crush.

“Five generations have worked this land,” he’d say after another day of tireless physical work. “It’s our family legacy. You should be proud to be a part of something as beautiful as this.”

By you, he meant my brothers and me. We’d share eye rolls whenever Dad launched into one of his “family legacy” sermons. I often wondered if he was trying to believe the words himself, more than he expected them to mean something to us. After all, he’d left Rosewood as soon as he was eighteen, wholly uninterested in the family business or the pride of legacy, only to return with his tail between his legs after tragedy struck, two children and a newborn in tow.

I wince a little and rap my fingers against the steering wheel. Maybe we’re a lot more alike than I thought, my father and me.

Not that I’d ever tell him that.

I finally turn off the main drag, which takes me down the long highway out to my family’s vineyard and past the Rosewood High School football field and Chantry Winery—two landmarks of my younger years.

High school in a little wine country town didn’t offer much. I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t unpopular either—kind of falling into that middle space that most high school students are in. I was invited to some parties, went to some school activities, had some friends.

Come to think of it, my high school experience is basically a metaphor for my life as the middle child. Not too much attention, but not enough.