“Thanks. Now how about you show me this amazing new kitchen, huh?”
His expression morphs. One second, he’s stressed out and pale, the next he’s beaming like a kid on Christmas morning, color flushing his cheeks.
“You’re not gonna believe the amount of countertop space we have now. There’s a pasta arm over the cooktop. A wine fridge.” He dashes down the hallway, abandoning his boxes, calling back over his shoulder. “When Jonah gets here, I’m gonna cook you both the best carbonara you’ve ever eaten.”
I was following behind him.
Was.
The moment I hear that name, I stumble to a halt. Dad’s disappeared into the bright, sun-soaked kitchen at the end of the hall, so he doesn’t see my stricken expression. “Jonah? He’s coming here?”
A loud clang comes from the kitchen. The sound of running water. “Of course. Won’t be long now. He texted about an hour ago. I told him I could pick him up, but he insisted on getting an Uber.”
Jonah, my half-brother. On his way here. I didn’t even consider that I might be seeing him while I was on break from the academy. He’s been living in San Diego for the past three years, working as a bartender while he finishes up his mechanical engineering degree. Jesus. I haven’t…
“Can you actually grab that box in the hall please, sweetheart? I think my good pasta pot’s in there.”
…seen him in three years.
“Presley?”
I stoop to grab the box, swallowing down the rising panic in my throat. “Sure thing, Dad. I’ll be right there.”
If I’d known Jonah was coming here, I wouldn’t have just left Mountain Lakes.
I would have fled the entire state of New Hampshire.
6
PRES
* * *
“Don’t kill me but where’s the Sriracha?”
Dad chokes on his mouthful of pasta. His cheeks turn purple, eyes bugging out of his head. Once he’s managed to swallow, he fixes Jonah with a horrified scowl. “What the hell is wrong with you? It’s a sin to drown everything in hot sauce.”
My half-brother grins. “Sriracha isn’t hot sauce. It’s—”
“I know what fucking Sriracha is! It’s blasphemy. You cannot put sriracha on spaghetti carbonara, okay? That’s just—I’ve never heard anything so—that’s criminal,” he sputters. “Criminal.”
Jonah’s hair used to be a warm dark brown, but it’s lightened during his time in Southern California. He’s tanned, and his eyes dance like they swallowed the Pacific Ocean. His teeth are a perfect, brilliant white. Dad doesn’t approve of the multicolored tattoos that track up his arms. He does approve of the fact that the son he had with his first wife, a marriage that lasted all of six months—not even long enough to see Jonah born—has taken up surfing and become quite proficient at it, apparently.
My half-brother nudges me with his foot under the table. “Come on, Pres. Tell him.” He tears off a hunk of garlic bread and tosses it into his mouth, talking around it as he chews. “Sriracha makes everything better.”
I’ve been winding the same few lengths of pasta around my fork for the past ten minutes. “I don’t like sriracha,” I mumble.
“Bullshit. You love hot sauce. Remember that summer we all went to Vancouver Island and I talked you into dumping a load on your ice cream cone? I convinced you it was raspberry sauce or something?” He laughs loud and long, cackling at his nine-year-old prank. I don’t laugh. Dad is silent, too. Neither of us remind him that I threw up into a trash can outside the old-fashioned ice cream shop because the huge amount of spicy sauce made me choke.
In another world, in another plane of reality, Dad turns to Jonah right about now and smacks him upside the head. He tells him he was a piece of shit for doing that to me when I was only six, and he’s been a piece of shit a thousand times since then for all of the other terrible things he’s done to me. In yet another parallel universe, my father punished Jonah back there on the boardwalk in Vancouver Island, and the boy learned his damn lesson and never bothered me again.
Trouble is, I live in this reality, and here Robert Witton has always felt too guilty that he was only a part-time father to Jonah to ever reprimand him for his atrocious behavior. And Jonah’s been jealous that Dad always has been around for me and has taken it out on me accordingly.
“Ahh come on, Red. With hair that color, you gotta like hot stuff.” Jonah snorts. “Should come and visit me after graduation. I’ll take you to all the best Mexican restaurants. We can drive into Mexico and grab some there if you’re craving authenticity. Not Tijuana, though. TJ’s a shit show. Nah, I’ll take you to Rosarito. Amazing food. Great bars. Even better surfing.” He bounces his eyebrows, shoving a forkful of spaghetti into his maw. The ridiculous amount of food prevents him from talking for a blessed moment. But then he swallows and he’s right back to it. “They have yoga retreats. And you can go digging up rocks down there, too. They let you keep whatever you find. Rose quartz, and…and…” Having already exhausted his extensive knowledge of crystals and precious stones, he waves a dismissive hand in the air. “You’re probably not into that shit anymore, though, right. You’re almost grown up now.”
“Oh, she’s definitely still into the rocks, aren’t you, sweetheart? And tarot reading. She’s got all kinds of witchy stuff in her room at the academy.”
Jonah finds this very funny. Dad smirks, happy that he’s amused his son; he doesn’t really seem to realize that he’s done so at his daughter’s expense.
“Offering to take Pres on a road trip is really kind, though, Jonah,” Dad says, grinning at him. He’s always been desperate to include Jonah in whatever he can. Always wanted to make him feel like he’s a part of our family. It must be making him all warm and fuzzy inside that Jonah would offer to take me on a cool road trip like that, as if he really does consider me his sister. My father didn’t hear the weird twist in Jonah’s tone when he called me Red though. Or he did and he chose to overlook it, as he has chosen to overlook so many other snide remarks in the past. Mom used to notice. She’d stand up for me when Jonah was being really nasty, but most of the time she’d simply give him a warning look and keep her mouth shut, afraid of being that woman—the second wife, who chides her husband’s other children when she has no real right.
“Thanks, but I can’t,” I say quietly.
Jonah leans across the table, pointing his fork at me. “Why’s that? Don’t tell me you have somewhere more important to be? Are you one of the popular girls now?”
“Haha! Come on. Presley’s far too low key for that,” Dad chips in. The betrayal cuts even deeper this time. Since when has he ever joined in with Jonah’s toxic, low-grade bullying? Carefully, I set my silverware down and pat my napkin to my mouth; the gesture’s unnecessary, but it gives me a second to breathe.
“Actually, I’m going to be traveling through Europe with my friends.”
Dad leans back in his chair. “What?”
“Yeah. I’ll be leaving the day after graduation, so—”