Free A Camden's Baby Secret by Victoria Pade

was no love lost between me and John Sr., and you want to know about that, too.”
    Livi hadn’t thought she was that transparent. But before she had the chance to respond, he warned, “It’s another long story.”
    â€œI’d still like to know,” she admitted.
    He took a deep breath and sighed, seeming more reluctant to get into this one. “Mandy’s folks have both passed, so the Tellers are the only grandparents Greta has left, and yeah, keeping them a part of her life the way Mandy and J.J. wanted them to be is a little of it.”
    â€œBut not all.”
    â€œNo,” he confirmed. “By the time I got here from Hawaii, J.J. was at the end and he knew it...” Callan’s voice cracked.
    Livi understood all too well how hard it was to talk about people dearly loved and lost.
    He cleared his throat. “J.J. was all Maeve and John Sr. had. He asked me to take over for him, to take care of them. I promised I would and I will. But there’s more to it than that promise... I also owe them.”
    â€œYou owe them?” Livi repeated.
    â€œWhen my parents died—”
    â€œWhen was that?”
    â€œThe end of my junior year in high school.”
    â€œOh. I was thinking it was more recent, but you were just a kid,” she said in surprise.
    â€œI don’t think I was ever much of a kid even before that. But I wasn’t eighteen,” he said ominously.
    â€œThey died together? Driving drunk?” she guessed.
    He shook his head. “They did drive drunk—they did everything drunk. It’s just lucky that around here it’s mostly open country roads without a lot of other cars to get in the way. But no, they weren’t in a car accident. They died in a trailer fire.”
    She hadn’t expected that.
    â€œMandy and J.J. and I had stayed after school to work on a project,” Callan said. “It was already too late when the fire department got there—in fact, that whole last acre around the trailer was on fire by then, because without any close neighbors it took somebody spotting the smoke in the distance to call it in. But investigators pinpointed the origin to inside the trailer, at the spot where my father’s chair was. I figured my old man had probably passed out with a lit cigarette in his hand.
    â€œAnd then...there was nothing,” Callan concluded with a sad wryness. “I didn’t have parents. I didn’t have a place to live. All I had was an after-school job at the computer-repair shop. I didn’t make enough to support myself.”
    â€œI’m so sorry...” Livi said, almost regretting that she’d gotten them into this now.
    He didn’t address her condolences, but went on matter-of-factly again. “I was seventeen. Going into the foster system would have just been weird at that point—I was mostly grown and I’d been taking care of myself and my parents for years. But I had no resources. All that was left of my family’s land was the acre the trailer was on—but it was too charred from fire damage for farming or raising livestock, and would take years to be usable again. It looked like I was going to have to drop out and get full-time work, but then J.J.—and Maeve—went to bat for me. They pleaded with John Sr. to let me move in for that last year. He didn’t want to do it—he’d never liked that J.J. was friends with me. And a couple of months before that I’d used J.J.’s computer to hack into the school’s system to play a dumb prank that had wreaked a lot of havoc—”
    â€œUh-oh...”
    â€œYeah... I was a kid without any supervision—no curfew, no rules and a brain that was always working and not always on the right path,” he acknowledged. “Anyway, the prank was traced back to J.J.’s computer and he got the blame. I set it right, even reversed what I’d done so I didn’t get kicked