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“Fancy.”
She snorted. “Hardly. It’s just a quirk of my heritage that my family is really proud of.” She shrugged as her gaze swept across the land, seeing more than the suburbs and farmland in her history.
I, however, craned my neck to look at the place that had created yet clearly not contained my little spitfire. Then, my eyes rounded. “Does that say Bowen Street?”
She sighed heavily. “Uh, yeah. That’s named after my family.”
“The Kings don’t have a street in Midland.” My grin widened. “You’re way fancier than us, Whitley Bowen.”
She rolled her eyes dramatically. “Lord help us.”
The car turned off Bowen and onto a paved lane, lined with giant oak trees. It was like something out of a movie. The house at the end of the lane was modest and well cared for. The grass was manicured, the trees immaculate, and everything about it said that someone had put a lot of love and care into the surroundings. I appreciated that.
Though I could see how a place like this would be suffocating for someone like Whitley.
We piled our luggage onto the walk as her mom opened the front door and rushed down the steps.
“You made it,” she said cheerfully.
“We made it,” Whitley confirmed.
“Walter is just inside. Can I help with the bags?” Cynthia asked.
“I have them,” I assured her.
She beamed at me as if I was everything she could have ever wanted in a son-in-law. It was slightly unfair that I’d done nothing to earn that praise, except an accident of birth, but it could be worse.
Cynthia put her arm around her daughter and whisked her toward the house. Whitley looked back at me once in alarm, but I waved her off.
“I’m right behind you.”
She looked relieved and followed her mom inside. I carried both of our suitcases up the stairs and into Whitley’s childhood home. It had been updated recently with modern finishings, but it couldn’t mask that the house had been built decades ago. I dropped the bags in the front room, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the mantel, where dozens of picture frames were filled.
Whitley was saying something to me, but I headed over to the mantel and found Whitley and what must have been her brother, Wyatt, looking back at me over and over again. No matter how difficult her upbringing had been, her parents loved her. Even if that love seemed to be conditional.
“Oh god,” she groaned, trying to yank me backward. “Don’t look at those. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Is this you?” I picked up a frame from the mantel with a picture of a young curly-haired brunette, smiling with braces and glasses as she held a baseball bat. “You played baseball?”
Whitley snatched it out of my hand. “Softball.”
“She was so good too,” Cynthia said. “Wyatt played baseball, and she wanted to be just like him at that age.”
“Ugh,” Whitley said, replacing the picture. “We don’t talk about those years.”
“How long did you play?”
She groaned. “Three years. They wanted me to play on the high school team, but I was over it by then.” She shrugged and met my eyes. “I wanted to sing.”
Her mother sighed behind her. “She might have gone to college on a full scholarship for softball if she’d stayed with it.”
“Instead, I had academic scholarships,” Whitley muttered under her breath.
“Which we were proud of,” her mother said quickly.
I picked up another picture. A young Whitley, maybe four or five, standing in a tutu and holding a bouquet of roses.
“You were adorable.”
