Before That Night: Unfinished Love Series: Caine & Addison, Book 1 by Violet Duke Read Free Book Online Page A

her break ‘taking them home’ every night, which basically just consisted of her driving around while the kids closed up the curtains in the back of the van, flipped all the rear seats down flat, inflated the air mattress, and got ready for bed. She’d park for a bit then and read Kylie a bedtime story without fail every night before heading back to the diner to finish her shift.
    In the beginning, the kids used to need to watch TV on the tablet to fall asleep—thank goodness for Joe’s strong wi-fi signal and the dark as night blackout curtains they drew closed over the van windows every night. But now, they were out like a light before she even parked back in Joe’s lot.
    Then they’d rinse and repeat. They spent the majority of their quality family time together on the weekends when she wasn’t working for Bernadette, and the kids were off of school, so really, the van was just a place where the kids slept. And it worked for them.
    In actuality, she’d managed to save up quite a bit of money already, and she probably could’ve moved them to an apartment at the start of this year. But, there was always the fear that a neighbor or a landlord would call social services when they realized how young she was. Her plan was to save up more money by staying in the van until the summer, and then moving them all to an apartment. Tanner would be starting high school in the fall so it was a good time to make that transition.
    He enjoyed running, weirdly enough, so she wanted him to go out for cross-country or track. Maybe that would lead to a scholarship for college, but even if it didn’t, she would work double shifts if she had to, to make sure he got to go. And her sister was still young, but if she wanted to dance ballet or do gymnastics in a few years, Addison wanted to have enough money saved up to make that possible.
    The extra money also couldn’t hurt when it came time for her to file for full custody of the kids on her twenty-first birthday next January.
    At that thought she turned to look at the two reasons why her age was a number that had no bearing on how old she was in life. She’d damn near raised both Tanner and Kylie.
    Back when she’d been the only eight year old among her friends that was allowed to babysit a newborn, she’d just thought it cool. As the years went on, and she started figuring out that her mom wasn’t so much ‘letting’ her babysit as she was ‘needing’ her to babysit because she was high as a kite and drunk as a skunk.
    Addison had never really had a chance to do the things that other kids her age had done. But she never regretted her life. Those kids were her entire world. And if she could give them the love and care that she never had growing up, she would move heaven and hell to make it so.
    Sure, their life wasn’t typical, but she took good care of them. The only thing they lacked was a home that didn’t have four wheels under it, and a guardian over the age of twenty-one.
    They’d been doing better than fine without either.
    For that matter, when they’d had both of those ‘lacking’ factors of a home without wheels and a guardian over the age of twenty-one, their quality of life had been worse. Way worse.
    Now, she never had to worry about drug needles on the ground or other traumatizing things for the kids to get exposed to.
    Now, she never had to worry about having enough food or money for field trips or really anything the children needed.
    Now, she never had to worry about them feeling unloved or unwanted—when she wasn’t working, Addison was spending her time with them, whether it was to help them with their homework or go to the park or just snuggle up under a blanket to watch a DVD borrowed from the library, she was there for them.
    She’d be damned if she’d let anyone say she wasn’t a good guardian for them and risk having them get taken from her, and each other.
    That brought her full circle to the Caine situation. Mutual interest or not, they had