Rocking Kin (Lucy & Harris, #3) - Terri Anne Browning Page 0,1

be a major feature in my life, since I had to live with him now. I had known it was coming from the moment the doctors had told my mom that there wasn’t anything else they could do for her quickly spreading cancer. The same day she had been told that she only had six months at the most to live, she’d been on the phone to my father. She wanted me to live with him when she died.

I’d begged on my hands and knees not to be sent away when she died. I’d cried, screamed, and broken things when she had calmly explained that it was time I got to know my other family. Her excuse was that she wanted me to know Scott before it was too late not to. My argument had been that I didn’t need to know the man that had supplied half my DNA. Carter Jacobson was my real father in my eyes. Caleb and Angie, even though they were almost four years older than me, were my brother and sister more than any blood sibling I could have had.

Why couldn’t I stay with them, people who actually loved me? Why did I have to go all the way across the country to live with people I didn’t know? People who I knew resented me just as much as I resented them?

“Because you deserve the chance to get to know him, McKinley,” my mother had told me in a voice barely above a whisper just two weeks ago. “Listen to me, baby girl. You only have a year until you will be eighteen. If you decide that you don’t want to be around your dad after that, then Carter will welcome you back with open arms. But take that time and get to know Scott and your stepsisters. Give your stepmother and her kids a chance. A real chance.” Abby had pushed a few tear-soaked strands of hair away from my face as she had smiled sadly down at me. “Don’t live with the regret of not trying, Kin.”

I’d been fighting her tooth and nail up until that very moment. Those words—those wise words—had been the last ones my mother had said to me before she couldn’t say anything else. The next day she had been placed on a ventilator and three days later she had died holding my stepfather’s hand.

Since then, I hadn’t protested once about having to move to California, but that didn’t mean I was looking forward to it. I didn’t want to have to say goodbye to my family, my friends, and my life in Virginia. I didn’t want to have to move three thousand plus miles to a new family, possible new friends, and a whole new life. It wasn’t fair that I had to do that.

But I was going to follow my mother’s advice. I wasn’t going to go through life with the regret of not at least trying.

It still hurt, though. It felt as if I had lost more than just the mother who had loved me just as much as I’d loved her. I was also losing Carter, Angie, and Caleb.

I was lying on my bed when the knock came. I’d come upstairs as soon as all the family and friends had left the house earlier in the evening. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep, wanting to memorize everything about the room that had been mine for the last thirteen years—even though I could tell you every little detail about it along with every happy memory I’d had behind those four walls.

Like, the Demon’s Wings poster hanging over my desk that I’d gotten the band to sign the last time they were in Roanoke. Or the OtherWorld poster that I’d been able to get Zander Brockman to sign for me when I’d seen him walking around Nashville when Caleb had taken me and a few of his college friends down to see a Trance concert last summer.

The Trance poster I’d had signed by the entire band that same day was on the opposite wall right beside my favorite Avenge Sevenfold posters. Angie and I had painted the walls a dark purple when I was fifteen, and the doorframe that led into my bathroom was smeared because Caleb had surprised his twin when he’d walked through the door, causing her to trip and fall against the wet paint. She’d had a purple streak on her cheek for two days, but I’d left the smeared mark there