“Oh.” It was the sharp inhale before her smile that told me she understood enough. “In that case, I’m glad you’re here early.”

I smiled back at her, a small one, a half-assed one. “Do you need help with anything for the party?”

“We almost have everything together already…” she trailed off, her features turning unnecessarily bright. Forced.

This sudden feeling of dread put me on alert. “Who helped?”

She named her husband. Slipping her arm over my shoulder, she pulled me into her side, kissing my forehead—I fought that tiny urge to pull away from her—and I knew. I fucking knew what she was going to say. “And Susie and Ricky.”

My entire body went rigid. I swear, even my knee started aching in recognition. My heart went double-time.

“Vanessa,” my mom said my name like it was made of eggshells. “They’ve been staying with us. I didn’t want to tell you because I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

I wouldn’t have. She had that right.

“She’s your sister,” Mom said, giving me a shake that wasn’t distracting me from the fact I was going to have to count to a thousand so I wouldn’t lose it. “She’s your sister,” she repeated.

Susie was a lot of things, and a fucking bitch was at the top of the list. Anxiety and a not insignificant amount of anger flooded my veins. How could she do this?

“Vanessa, please.”

Why would she try to ambush me like this? First it was Aiden. Now it was my own mom ambushing me with Susie and her asshole.

“Be nice. For me,” she insisted.

I was going to end up at the liquor store before the day was over. I could already feel it.

The urge to be mean gripped my tongue. I wanted to ask her about the hundreds of times she hadn’t done something for me. I really did. On my best days, I was convinced I’d forgiven her for the days at a time she never came home. For making me resort to having to steal money from her purse to buy groceries because she’d forgotten again how there wasn’t anything to eat at home. For leaving me alone and forcing me to deal with three angry, mean older sisters who couldn’t have cared any less about my little brother and me.

But I couldn’t get myself to go there. Regardless of how many years she’d been sober, I knew now that my mom hung by a thread. She had a problem and she was dealing with it, even if it was twenty years too late to take back her mistakes.

All I could do was grunt; I couldn’t promise her anything. I really couldn’t, no matter how badly I wanted to tell her this could be the first time since we were kids that Susie and I wouldn’t end up wanting to kill each other within minutes of being face-to-face. Good grief, that was sad. It seemed liked we hadn’t ever gotten along, and by that, I meant my slightly older sister—only by a year and a half—had singled me out and hated my guts for as long as I could remember.

I’d taken a lot of shit from her for those first few years. She’d bullied the hell out of me. It had started off with her pinching me whenever our mom wasn’t around, which was always, then progressed to name calling, evolved to stealing the few things I had and then ended with physical confrontations. She’d been an asshole forever.

Then one day, when I was probably fourteen, I decided I was done taking her shit. Unfortunately, she kicked my ass and I’d ended up in the emergency room with a broken arm after she’d pushed me down the stairs. It was that broken arm that had led Child Protective Services to our house because our mom hadn’t shown up to the hospital after she’d had people try to contact her. The five of us got split up after that night, and it was only at one other point, four years later that I lived with my mom or sisters again. That hadn’t ended well at all.

It was a painful, miserable history I’d given up on a long time ago.

I had accepted that there was something wrong with all of my sisters but mainly Susie. As I got older, I realized that chances were high my mom had drank while she’d been pregnant with them. They were all small, unlike my little brother and me, and had learning and behavioral problems. While I accepted now that they couldn’t help most of the things that were wrong with them, it didn’t help ease my resentment much.

For the sake of my relationship with my mom, we avoided bringing Susie up and she only briefly mentioned my other two sisters once a year.

Until shit like this.

I seriously couldn’t believe Susie and Ricky were staying there, and that no one had warned me. Diana was going to lose it when I told her.

“Vanessa, please. I’m so happy you’re here. I’ve missed you. You never come visit enough,” my mom laid the guilt-trip road down for me thick.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

There was nothing in this world I couldn’t do, I reminded myself. Everything in my life had worked out. I had more than I’d ever imagined. The past didn’t matter anymore.

With a deep breath, I forced out an “Okay,” gritting my teeth the entire time.

“Yes?” she asked, beaming with hope.

I nodded, urging my muscles to stop locking up. I knew what I was going to say was an asshole comment. I realized I was being immature, but I really couldn’t find it in my soul to care. “Yeah. I’ll play nice as long as she does.”

The sigh she let out?

Yeah, she knew. She knew Susie didn’t know how to be nice.

Chapter Fifteen

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” I snarled as I tried to shake off my anger for about the millionth time in the last day.

Diana scoffed as she moved around me, a stained plastic bowl in one hand, a brush in the other. Her brown eyes temporarily shifted from the section of my head she’d already put color on, to meet my gaze before she blew a raspberry. “You know I don’t want to talk about your family, but when I think they can’t get any shittier, they do.” Liar. She didn’t mind going over the finer defects of four-sixths of my family. How many times had we sat in her room and acted out the hundreds of things we’d do and say to my sisters in retaliation for whatever they’d put me through? A hundred? Not that we’d ever gone through with any of it. They were older than us, and you didn’t mess with crazy.

“The worst part was after Ricky grabbed my arm, no one said anything. They all wanted to act like nothing had happened.”

“Jesus, V,” my best friend muttered. “I told you not to go.”

She had, and I’d been stubborn and didn’t listen. “I know.”

Her hand touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

Not as sorry as I was.

I made it three hours at my mom’s before everything went to hell. Three hours before I stormed out of her house, pissed out of my mind. I was honestly surprised that I had managed to spend the night at my hotel before heading to the airport first thing in the morning to catch a flight back to Dallas on standby. The anger hadn’t abated as much as I’d hoped on a good night’s sleep, and the flight back hadn’t helped much either.

As soon as I landed, I’d texted one of the only people in the world who was loyal to me, and then headed over to Diana’s so I could tell her everything and get it off my chest. Did it help? Not much, but it was something. So I told her everything that had happened as she dyed my hair some surprise color I told her she could choose. It was one of the benefits of being your own boss.