Scarlet Awakening (Sweet Secrets #2)

by Taylor Henderson

  My mom beamed. Despite my attempts, I couldn’t ignore the twinge of sadness that was still in her eyes. As we loaded our bags and suitcases into the car, and my mom struck up a small conversation, I hoped that this visit would make whatever sadness she was feeling go away.

  I would do whatever it took to make her happy again.

  Chapter 2

  After about a half an hour of driving, we finally pulled up to my grandparents’ house. My mom had moved back in with them because she wasn’t ready to be on her own. It was also the safest option for her since she still experienced bouts of depression. I felt bad that she wasn’t able to start fresh and live on her own while she was in the process of divorcing my dad, but it was safer this way.

  As soon as Mom came to a stop in the driveway, Ella hopped out of the car and went running to the front door. Mom was surprised by her excited action, while I was just surprised that she was awake. She had been quiet the whole ride, and with her track record for falling asleep, I figured she had been asleep after five minutes of driving, if that.

  “Let’s go say hello to your grandparents—we can get your bags later. They’re really excited to see you girls,” my mom said, glancing at me. “You girls are all they’ve talked about for the past week. I think Grandma even made apple pie for dessert.”

  I smiled. Apple pie was always my favorite dessert, and Grandma had the best recipe. Add a little vanilla ice cream to it, and I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. She was notorious for making it whenever she wanted to make me happy and it always worked—whether I was sick, down in the dumps, or just coming over to spend the night.

  I followed Ella’s suit and hopped out of the car to head inside. The house was a nice sized, three-story home that my grandparents had bought after they had gotten married forty years ago. Since then, it had had a few renovations to expand it and add more rooms as my grandparents’ family had grown. The original house had had three bedrooms, and now it had six; enough to comfortably fit my grandparents and their three children, while still having room for an office for my grandfather and a guest room. When we lived in California, Ella and I spent days at a time at our grandparents’ house since they hadn’t been far from us, and they sometimes got lonely with all of the space. After we had moved away, I was sure they felt like the house had too much space for them since all of their children were grown and living on their own. Maybe it was beneficial for them too that Mom had moved back in.

  Hanging on the front door was a sign that Ella and I had painted when we were younger that said, ‘Grandma Lives Here’ and had my small handprint on one side of the words, and Ella’s on the other. Ella stood on the porch with a large smile plastered on her face. We had always been close to our grandparents, and since we were their only grandchildren, they took every opportunity to spoil us.

  “Did you ring the doorbell?” I questioned, waiting anxiously for the door to open.

  Ella glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “No, I’m just standing here trying to send telepathic signals to Grams so she knows to come and open the door,” she answered, sarcasm dripping from her words.

  I smiled sweetly and raised an eyebrow at her. “Well, is it working?”

  She stuck her tongue out at me just as the sound of Grandma’s voice came from behind the door. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” she called loudly. As she reached the door, she pulled it open and let out a screeching sound.

  “Paul!” she cried, calling out my grandfather’s name loudly. She raised a hand and covered her mouth as she looked over Ella and me. “Wow, you two have grown so much since I last saw you.”

  Ella hustled forward and tossed her thin arms around my tiny grandmother. “Grandma,” she cried, hugging her tightly. All I could see was Ella and the white hair of my grandmother as they hugged.

  “Gabriella,” Grandma cooed, while leaning back and holding her at arm’s length. “My, you look so much like me when I was younger—but ten times more stunning.” She winked an eye before leaning around to look at me. “Lena, come give your old grandma a hug.”

  Smiling, I moved closer and hunched down to wrap my arms around her. She was so short compared to the rest of the family, standing at a mere five feet tall. Her hair smelled like lavender, and the smell enveloped me as I hugged her tightly, resting my head on her shoulder for a moment.

  “I missed you, Grandma,” I said as I pulled away.

  Her lips curved into a smile that matched my mom’s. “I missed you too, kiddo. You girls come on inside, get out of the heat,” she ordered, waving us into the air-conditioned house.

  “I actually missed the heat,” Ella said. “It feels like home.”

  I nodded in agreement.

  Clapping her hands together, Grandma squinted her eyes. “Now where is that old fart?” she questioned, referring to my grandfather. She often called him names that were associated with old age because it annoyed him. According to Grandpa, who was a few years away from being seventy, he was as fit as a fiddle. “That man has been running around here getting prepared for your visit, and he isn’t even in a hurry to come out and see you when you get here?” She shook her head. “I will never understand how that man works.”

  Ella and I shared a look, smiling.

  “I guess I’ll show you which rooms you’ll be staying in.” She raised a hand to stop us from speaking when she saw we were about to open our mouths to say something. “The rooms you used to stay in have been changed around. You grandfather thought we needed more storage, and the other is now where your mom stays.”

  We nodded simultaneously, our questions being answered.

  “Ella, you are staying in the room across from your old room, and Lena, you will stay in the attic room that your parents used to stay in whenever they spent the night.”

  Despite the fact that we each knew the house like the back of our hands, our grandma showed us both to our rooms. As we headed through the house and walked past our grandparents’ bedroom, we saw that our grandfather was asleep in the lounge chair in front of the TV. He was snoring loudly with his head tilted back and his mouth opened wide. Grandma laughed when she saw him, went to turn the TV off, and came back muttering about how he ran himself ragged waiting for us, and had fallen asleep like the old man he is.

  After we had each seen our rooms, Ella and I went back to the car to grab our stuff. We each had a lot of unpacking to do before we could get settled in. After being awake all day though, I was extremely tired, and decided that I would unpack in the morning. Instead, while I waited for dinner to be ready, I lay sprawled out across the bed in the attic, staring at the ceiling while deep in thought. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this summer was going to alter my life in some way. I just wasn’t sure how.

  Chapter 3

  I pulled a long sleeve sweater from deep within the confines of my suitcase and stared at it quizzically. Wow, I really did go overboard packing. I know I said that I was packing in preparation for anything that came my way, but seriously, a long sleeve sweater? Did I think that sometime during my visit San Diego was going to be hit by a blizzard?

  Shaking my head, I folded the sweater neatly and tucked it away into the bottom drawer of my dresser. I had been unpacking for nearly two hours now, and I still hadn’t gotten far. I blamed my lack of progress on my short attention span and my laziness. So far, I had managed to organize each drawer according to clothing article. I had separate drawers for bottoms, tops, bathing suits and undergarments, pajamas, and miscellaneous items. The sweater was placed into the miscellaneous drawer where it was accompanied by a thin raincoat, sweatpants, and a pair of gray legwarmers. Seriously, I had a packing problem.

  My phone buzzed on the dull hardwood floor just a few inches away from my thigh. I scooped the phone up and smiled at the screen when I saw that the message was from Violet. She had been sending me cute videos of her sister, Lilly, all morning. Lilly had started taking dance lessons a few months ago, and she had her first recital coming up in a week, so
she had been utilizing her space at home and had been practicing all through the house, despite her mom’s efforts. I unlocked the phone, which instantly opened the message to show another video. Along with the video, Violet had sent a message telling me to listen to her mom.

  I hit play on the video, and watched closely as the camera focused on a dancing, tutu-clad Lilly. She was spinning around the Forresters’ living room, weaving in and out of the furniture and doing ballet-style leaps over little obstacles that littered the floor. The obstacles were small stuffed animals, and toys that Lilly had most likely set up.

  “Watch this, Lizzie,” Lilly’s voice blasted from my phone’s speaker. ‘Lizzie’ was her nickname for Violet, whose middle name was Elizabeth. In the video Lilly stopped moving and faced the camera head on, then smiled so brightly that her eyes scrunched up some. Her dark curls continued to bounce around her face from her previous motion. “I, Lilly Forrester, am going to do something that no other dancer can do.” She raised her arms high over her head and proceeded to do a cartwheel from the living room into the dining room where her mom was.

  I heard Mrs. F. let out a shriek, and it sounded like she was about to have an aneurysm or something. The shriek caused Lilly to lose her footing, and fall onto her butt. “No cartwheels!” Violet’s mom said loudly. She wasn’t yelling, but she was definitely worked up. “You could break your neck!” Then the video ended and I laughed loudly at her words. Mrs. F. was known for being an extreme worrywart. I thought it was hilarious, while Violet thought her mom was crazy. I was sure that if I had grown up with her as my mom, I would think she was crazy too.

  I shook my head, still smiling to myself about the video as I typed back a reply before setting my phone back on the ground and staring into my suitcase again. I would probably be done by now if I had continuously stuck with unpacking when I first started. I had begun right after dinner, and Ella and I had decided to have a race to see who could finish first. She won.

  It wasn’t fair, really. I had more to unpack than she did, so I should have gotten a head start. It had only taken her half an hour to unpack everything. How was that even possible? When she finished and had come up to brag about her winning, I no longer saw the point in rushing, and began to take my sweet time. I spent a while spread out across my bed listening to music, texting Violet, and scrolling through my Twitter feed, doing practically anything other than unpacking my luggage. I had even taken a break to go talk to Grandpa, who had been doing a little organizing of his own. Apparently Grandma had given him the task of cleaning out the old guest room that had been converted to a storage room. She didn’t want me to be stuck up in the attic for my whole visit. I was fine being in the attic, but Grandma disagreed, saying that she wanted me to be on the same level as everyone else. It truly didn’t bother me, so I didn’t see why it mattered.

  When I went to see Grandpa, he was in the middle of trying to figure out the most effective way to begin cleaning the room. In my opinion the most effective way to begin cleaning was to start, but he was sure there was a certain way that he needed to tackle his task. When I left him, he was grumbling about the saying, “Happy wife, happy life.” At the moment, making Grandma happy by cleaning was not making his life happy.

  Sighing, I shook those thoughts from my mind and reached into my bag again, pulling out a cute red sundress that I had gotten on my last trip to the mall with Ella. I hadn’t worn it yet, but I was excited to. Red had always been my favorite color. Not only was it just a nice color in general, but I felt it also made me look sexy and mysterious. It probably didn’t, but a girl could dream. Standing, I went to hang the dress up in my closet. This unpacking thing was rapidly becoming tedious.

  With a groan, I leaned my back against the footboard of my bed. Maybe I could convince Ella to help me finish up? Just as I was about to stand, my eye caught a little corner of a piece of paper that was poking out from behind the dresser. I furrowed my brows, wondering what it could be. The room had been completely empty when I arrived, so I was curious to see what this was. It was probably nothing, but either way my interest was piqued.

  Pushing myself away from the bed, I crouched down next to it as I gripped the corner of the paper and pulled it from its hiding place. I unfolded it, seeing the back first. There was one sentence scrawled across the back. It was short and sweet.

  Keep us in your memories.

  That was all that it said. There was no name signed under it, or even a date. Just that one sentence. Now I was really curious. Flipping the paper over, my jaw dropped almost instantly. It was a picture of my mom in the hospital, holding one bundle of white in each arm, with a man standing next to her. I could see now why there was no name or date listed on the back. The date was obvious. The picture had to have been taken on August 8th, the day that my mom gave birth to the twins. That was the first and last time she had seen them. I assumed the man in the picture was the guy who had adopted them, and probably the owner of the handwriting on the back as well.

  Last year my parents sat Ella and me down to tell us about my mom’s pregnancy, and then had ruined the moment by telling us they had decided not to keep the baby. My dad had just lost his job, and we were going through money issues. The best decision for them at the time was to find a new home for the baby with people who would be able to give him or her everything they needed. A few months later we found out that Mom was pregnant with twins, and that was when we knew for sure that our parents weren’t going to change their minds. Ella and I had been heartbroken. We stayed in California during her pregnancy, and then when the twins were born they were given to their new family in the hospital. Ella and I never even got a chance to meet them, or even find out what sex they were. Our parents had been really secretive. Not long before the twins were born, my dad had been contacted about a job in Virginia, and almost immediately after the twins were born we packed up and traveled across the country to settle down and start fresh. The twins were never very far from my mind though. I had always hoped that one day I would have a chance to meet them.

  I stood hurriedly and took the stairs down from my room to find Ella. Luckily, she was still awake, sitting in her room listening to music. I entered without knocking, earning a glare. I didn’t care though. I knew that she would want to see this.

  Moving toward where she was sprawled across her bed, I thrust the photograph out to her. She took it curiously, staring at the front in silence before flipping it over to read the back.

  “Do you recognize him?” she asked me, eyebrows furrowed.

  I shook my head no. “He’s got to be the guy who adopted the twins. Why else would he be in the picture?”

  Ella shrugged in response, staring at the front of the photo again. I stood in silence for a moment as she sat still on her bed, just holding the picture and frowning down at it.

  I bit my lip as realization crashed over me. “If we find him, we would probably find the babies too.”

  Then, with a smile curving her thin lips upward, her gaze met mine. “We could finally meet them.”

  Chapter 4

  Ella led the way as we made our way through the various rooms in search of our grandparents. We had spent quite some time in her room talking about a plan of action that we could take to figure out who the man in the picture was. That was what we had nicknamed him for now—the man in the picture. Finally, after a long discussion that only really consisted of two or three ideas, Ella decided the easiest course of action was to ask our grandparents.

  I was skeptical about the idea. My initial train of thought was that if my mother had gone to the effort to hide the picture, unless it had just fallen behind the desk, then my grandparents would most likely be unaware of who the man was. My mother was the type of person who kept her feelings internalized, and easily kept things hidden from others. If she had a secret she didn’t want anyone to find out about, then that secret stayed hidden. Ella and I both knew that our siblings’ whereabouts was something our mom wanted to keep hidden, and the
refore she probably hadn’t told anyone, other than my dad. Yet on the off chance that she had confided in our grandparents, we had to check with them to see what they knew.

  Since I found the picture last night, I decided to wait until morning to bring it up. Ella had wanted us to find our grandparents instantly and force them to tell us what they knew, but even she knew that wasn’t a good way to go about getting information. All night I tossed and turned with thoughts of the picture and the twins. Once I had finally gotten to sleep, I dreamt about finally meeting them, and holding two little bundles in my arms. In my dream both of the twins were rosy-cheeked little boys with curly red hair and brown eyes like me. It was unrealistic considering they were no longer little babies, and were probably pretty big now. I remembered when Ella was a toddler, getting into anything and everything that her chubby little fingers could reach. Before she was born, I remember being frustrated that I was no longer going to be an only child, but that had all changed when I first met her in the hospital. I wished that I had that same memory of the twins. Becoming an older sister was momentous, and I would always cherish that role.

  When Ella woke up, she came rushing into my room to get me up too. Unlike our mother, our grandparents were always up bright and early, so we knew we wouldn’t run the risk of getting caught during our ‘interrogation.’ With her in the lead, we exited my room in search of our grandparents. Our first stop was their bedroom, but neither of them were in there. We checked each room as we passed, but no one was in the makeshift storage room, either.

  Ella poked her head into my grandfather’s study, groaning when she saw that he wasn’t in there. She came out, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Seriously, where the hell can they be?”

  I raised an eyebrow. We had only checked the upstairs portion of the house. There was a very good chance that our grandparents were on the main level. I didn’t even have to voice my thoughts to Ella, because she seemed to know from my expression what I was thinking.