Bitter Truth (Hawthorne Vines #1)

“Well, I’ll definitely take one of those next time.”

She tucks her body into mine and kisses my chest, and I wrap my arms around her. It isn’t long before I hear her breathing begin to slow, soft snores coming from her that make me smile.

God, I don’t know what I was expecting with Murphy Hawthorne, but it sure as hell wasn’t this. And the deeper we fall, the more pressure I feel to tell her about what happened in Chicago.

I don’t want to.

Fuck, I really don’t want to.

But I feel like I need to.

And if I’m honest, she deserves the truth. Not only about what happened, but about who I am and what I’ve done.

I lie in bed for a long while, thinking about everything, and when I open my eyes in the morning, I know I probably only got a few hours of sleep, if that.

I gently wake Murphy, and she gives me a groggy smile. I drop a kiss to her forehead, wishing that after our first time together, we had the ability to laze around in bed and enjoy each other some more.

Instead, we both tug on our clothes, check out of the hotel, and walk across the street to the hospital.

Last night, the woman at the desk provided me with a room number but said I’d need to come back in the morning. So when we walk through the front doors, Murphy and I are able to just head straight to the elevators and up to the seventh floor.

“How can I help you?” a nurse asks as we exit, a flat expression on her face.

“My mom is in 705. Sonia Hart.”

“Bed 705 is empty.”

I blink a few times, then change my question, figuring I must have just been given wrong information.

“Can you let me know where I can find her then?”

The nurse sighs and rolls her chair to a computer. “What was the name again?”

“Sonia Hart.”

She clicks around for a minute or two. “She was discharged this morning at 6:00 a.m.”

My entire body bristles in frustration. “What? Why? When I came last night they said I could see her if I came back during visiting hours. They didn’t say anything about her leaving before then.”

“You family?” She eyes me with a level of passivity that has me gritting my teeth.

“Yes, I’m her son,” I tell her again.

“All I can tell you is that she was unconscious when she arrived yesterday, and this morning she left against medical advice. We did a blood panel overnight and it came back with a BAC of 0.31.”

I feel a hand on my back and I startle, having forgotten for a moment that Murphy is here, but almost immediately, something inside me settles just a little bit at her touch.

“Did she say anything? About where she was going, or …?”

“I’m not her babysitter,” she says. “Sorry.”

Sighing, I turn away from the nurse, frustrated at not only her lack of compassion, but at the situation in general.

How can they just let her leave? Clearly something was bad enough that she was brought unconscious to the hospital.

Murphy slips her hand in mine and gives it a gentle squeeze as we wait for the elevator.

I hate that she’s here, seeing this. That she has any idea about this part of my life.