Bitter Truth (Hawthorne Vines #1)

“Murph, you comin’, honey?”

I glance over at my aunt Sarah, who stands in the doorway of my bedroom with a sweet smile on her face.

As much as she looks like my father with her heart-shaped face and thick head of chestnut curls falling wildly down her back, she looks far more like my grandmother when she smiles.

Though that’s where the similarities end.

My grandmother was petite in all ways. My father and Aunt Sarah take after my grandfather with their long, athletic physiques and broad shoulders, two traits that passed down to my brothers and me.

But I love seeing that bit of my grandma in her when she smiles, which is far more often than anyone else in the family.

“I made your favorite.”

My lips tilt up at the sides.

“Sloppy joes?”

She nods. “You know it. I couldn’t have my girl moving home and put out something stupid for dinner, like lasagna.”

I giggle, taking in the sight of her and all the warm memories that come with having her back in my world now.

I was particularly picky as a kid, and I often sat at the dinner table, stone faced, glaring at the dish in front of me, refusing to eat. Unlike my father, who would glare at me with his own stone face and demand I eat or go hungry, Aunt Sarah was always concocting new things to see if she could get me to try something.

I hated lasagna. The idea of food stacked in multiple layers was something I detested. But I was willing to eat sloppy joes, which is basically just the same insides of a beef lasagna but with bread instead. And then, one time, she made a sloppy joe lasagna.

“I’m trying to break your brain,” she told me then, grinning at me as I stared with wide eyes at my favorite meal wrapped in noodles instead of bread.

Thankfully, I’ve grown out of whatever weird food idiosyncrasies I used to have. But it makes me smile to think that after all these years, my aunt thought of something like this for my first night home.

“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” I tell her.

She nods and leaves me alone again.

I sigh, turning my head to stare up at the ceiling. I’ve been lying on my bed for the past hour or so, studying the plastic stars I put up there when I was in junior high. I never thought to take them down as I got older. But instead of reminiscing about my childhood or thinking back to the night Quinn and I put those stars up, I’ve been trying to decide how to talk to my father.

He looked through me this morning, like he didn’t even see me.

Didn’t say a word. Didn’t make a face.

After nine years?

I mean, I know I’ve always been his least favorite child, but come on. He could have said something. Anything, really.

He could have yelled at me to get out of his house.

He could have given me an angry face or thrown something across the room.

But no, he just gave me a half-hearted glance and ignored me completely.

The worst part about it is that it reminds me so much of how invisible I felt growing up.

I sigh again, my hand coming up to wipe at the tear trailing toward my ear.

It’s really easy to promise yourself something like I won’t let the man make me cry again when you’re living four-hundred-plus miles away and have nearly a decade of time to compartmentalize your anger.

It’s a lot harder when you’re staring your father in the face, still curious whether or not he loves you at all.

I puff out another long breath and roll off the bed, then tug my hair up into a messy bun and head out to the kitchen. I can hear the clanking of plates and cutlery, the scraping of wooden chairs along the tiled floor.