Momo

“I'm not the glass ballerina," I said firmly. "I'm not going to shatter.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Hawthorne Legacy

“Everything hurts.” Only Grayson Hawthorne could say that and still sound utterly bulletproof. “It hurts all the time, Avery, but I know the man I was raised to be.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit

“She loved him. It hurt to love him,
and she loved him anyway.He left her, and she
loved him anyway.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Hawthorne Legacy

“What if he hates me?"

"No one could possibly hate you, Xander," I told him, my heart twisting.

"Avery, people have hated me my whole life." There was something in his tone that made me think that very few people understood what it was like to be Xander Hawthorne.

"Not anyone who knows you," I said fiercely.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit