Scarlet Awakening (Sweet Secrets #2) by Taylor Henderson Read Free Book Online Page B

to get into the kitchen and bake. I wasn’t sure what it was that she was making, but her specialty was cherry cheesecake. I wasn’t a big fan of cherries, but somehow when they were incorporated into the cheesecake, Mom made them taste like they were plucked straight from a cherry tree in the Garden of Eden.
    While Ella kept Mom busy, and also acted as a warning for me whenever she left the kitchen, I was on my laptop in the living room searching for our mystery guy. At first I stayed upstairs in my room doing the search, but Mom had come in and asked if I would come downstairs to join the family; which ultimately made my sneaky searching task a little harder since I was now out in the open. It was probably for the best though, because I didn’t want to seem like I was being an introvert. She might think I was down in the dumps about being here, especially since I had still yet to leave the house for more than running errands. I think Grandpa was trying to get us to leave and reconnect with old friends, but for me that ship had sailed. Even telling him that hadn’t stopped him from sending me to the grocery store on another occasion, as well as to the convenience store, and even to fill up his gas tank. Each time he had bribed Ella to tag along and had given us both some cash to spend while we were out. It was obvious he was looking for any excuse to get us to venture out of the house for a day, and apparently if we wouldn’t leave of our own accord then his course of action was to take it into his own hands.
    My grandfather was sitting in the rocking chair watching an extremely boring golf tournament in the living room with me, and occasionally trying to strike up a conversation. Each time that happened I did my best to lead the conversation into a dead end. I needed to focus.
    My search had begun on Facebook, where I had opened up my mom’s friend list and typed in the name John. The twenty-something people who came up in the search with the name John didn’t surprise me. After searching the name, I narrowed the findings down to the men with John as their first name. That only removed four people, which left me to the tedious task of looking at each picture to try and see if any of the men were the John from the picture with my mom and the twins.
    If only everyone had actual pictures of themselves as their profile picture, then everything would have been easier, but they didn’t. A surprising majority of the guys had pictures of their favorite sports team’s logo, or their children as their profile picture. There was one who even had a picture of a cartoon penguin, and another guy who had a Pok é mon character as his avatar. For both of them it was their only picture on their entire page. I concluded that they were both camera shy, and therefore couldn’t be the John that I was looking for before I exited their profiles. Annoyingly, the Facebook search led me nowhere. None of the men with actual pictures, or non-private profiles, matched the John we were searching for.
    A last name would surely do me some good right now. The only way I would get one though was with my parents’ help. I could go about that in three ways. The first option would be by asking my mom, which would be the worst possible thing for me to do. The second would be to ask my dad, who I hadn’t spoken to on the phone yet since I had gotten here and didn’t want the reason that I called him to be related to the twins. The last option was by going through Mom’s journal again in hopes that she referred to John by first and last name at some point. The first two options were undoubtedly the most effective, but I was worried about how they would react, especially Mom. Her emotions were still fluctuating easily, and ruining her good mood with a question about the man she had given her children up to might devastate her. I couldn’t handle that. I just wanted her to be happy, and if that meant that Ella and I had to go behind her back to find