Kaden's marriage to Evangeline Knight is nothing more than a business arrangement.
However, instead of remaining professional about it, Kaden does the opposite and ends up falling hard and falling fast for his sultry new step-daughter, Amabella.
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Amabella's POV
College is overrated.
I came to that realization after spending two years at university, and then I dropped out.
I left my friends and family behind and returned home jobless and without a degree. To be honest, I felt more relieved than ashamed about it. Yeah, I hated disappointing my mother, and I never thought I would carry the title of being a college dropout, but I did what needed to be done for the sake of my mental health and bank account.
Sometimes I think about how my life would have turned out if I had chosen the road less traveled by taking a gap year to figure out who I even am as a person. Instead, I stuck with the norm and went straight to college after graduating high school at eighteen, which resulted in me later saying to hell with it all. I spent the following three years working on myself, and so far, I've been having fun trying and failing at new things. I worry less about the future and spend more time living in the moment. Life is good. I'm happy.
Or at least I was before my apartment complex caught fire this morning.
"Enjoy the rest of your day," I say to the Uber driver before exiting the car and heading up my mother's driveway with the last of my bags.
I've yet to receive a reason on how the fire got started, but after the firefighters got it under control, I was part of the group of residents who got cleared to go back inside the building to retrieve a few belongings. The fire destroyed most of my stuff, so I packed up what was salvageable, and that left me with two full duffle bags and my wallet. No purse. Just the wallet.
Safe to say I'll be living a minimalist lifestyle for a while.
"Mom, I'm here!"
After entering my childhood home, the aroma is what I notice first. My mother has her favorite essential oils burning, sweet orange mixed with lemongrass, and I can't help but smile. The house smells the same as when I left all those years ago for college. It's almost like nothing has changed.
Then I spot the cardboard boxes sitting around.
My mother is clearly packing up to move and has neglected to tell me about this. I don't know whether to feel upset or concerned.
"Hello! Anyone home?"
I shut the front door and kick my bags off to the side while scanning the area. Crumbled packaging paper is all over the living room floor, our family photos no longer hang on the walls, and the furniture is gone. The sight grows more depressing the longer I stand here.
With my friends still doing their thing at college and my father no longer in the picture, my mother is all I have. I'm grateful for her taking me in on such short notice, but had I known I'd be an inconvenience by disrupting her moving plans, I would have gone into my savings and stayed at a hotel long enough for me to secure another apartment.
