Between Hello and Goodbye(14)

“Shy?” I snorted and tore into a rib. “Sure. That’s me.”

“But you’re not even having a sleepover with her,” Morgan persisted.

Nalani nodded. “This one feels different. The way you talked about her—”

“I didn’t talk about her any differently than any other call,” I said. “Though I now deeply regret saying anything at all.”

Morgan spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “You have the next four days off. What else are you going to do?”

“It wouldn’t kill you to show Faith the island,” Nalani said. “She came all this way.”

“Yeah, Asher. She came all this way,” Morgan echoed, the two of them blinking and grinning like idiots.

For a second, they almost got me. I didn’t have any plans but to hang with some guys from the firehouse, maybe surf, maybe play video games. And sure, maybe lately I’d been feeling a few twinges of…something. I wasn’t fucking lonely but…

But getting there?

I shoved away that feeling of want and buried it under painful memories. Morgan had been able to get over our fucked-up childhood—a major victory. I’d done everything in my power to not let it take root in him the way it had in me. My pain ran deep, and I used it to keep me from being betrayed. I didn’t want to want anything, ever again.

I pushed my plate aside. “What’s for dessert?”



“She seems brave,” Kaleo said, tossing me the baseball in the yard as the sky darkened to deep purple above us.

“Who does?”

“That Faith lady.”

I frowned and tossed the ball back. “You were listening to all that?”

“I like to listen.” Kal caught the ball in his mitt with a natural ease and chucked it back.

“That’s the truth. How do you know she’s brave?”

“A helicopter lifted her into the air, and she wasn’t scared. I’d be scared.”

“She handled it pretty well,” I admitted.

“Because she’s brave,” Kaleo said. “It sucks she hurt herself. Remember that time I skinned my knee?”

The falling dark hid my smile. I’d lost count of how many times my nephew skinned his knee. The ball went back and forth between us.

“I remember.”

“I still got to go on the field trip to Waimea Canyon,” Kal said.

“What’s your point?”

“It would’ve sucked if I had to miss it.”

“I’d have just taken you the next week.”

“But the Faith lady doesn’t have someone to take her next week. She’s missing the canyon and everything else.”

Not for the first time, I noted my nephew was a lot smarter than any seven-year-old needed to be.

“What do you think I should do about it?”

Kaleo grinned, toothy white in the dimness of dusk. “You should take her around in the firetruck!”

I laughed. “Pretty sure that’s what you want to do.”

“Can I?”

“Again? We went twice last month.”

He rolled his eyes. “Like I’m ever going to get tired of that, Uncle Ash.”

I caught his last toss, then dumped my mitt and the ball to the ground. “Come on. It’s getting too dark to see.”

He joined me and I slung my arm around his little shoulders as we crossed the thick, overgrown grass of the yard. My brother’s house was perched on a bluff, tucked into the green of Kauai. Below, the Pacific Ocean stretched out, black and huge under a sky as infinite and scattered with stars.

“You should go back to Faith,” Kaleo said.

I stiffened. “You too, huh? Why is everyone in my business about it?”

“Don’t you want to get married?”

“Nah. I’m not the marrying type. Why?”

“Because the sooner you get married, the sooner you’ll have a baby and then I’ll have someone to play with. Besides”—he looked up at me, scrutinizing—“you’re not getting any younger.”

I snorted a laugh. “Ask your smartass parents to give you a sibling.”

“Does sibling mean little brother?”

“Or sister.”

Kaleo sighed gravely. “I would, but babies are expensive.”

“Where the hell did you hear that?”

“Mama. When she was talking to Daddy about the business being in trouble.”

I jerked to a stop. “The business is in trouble?”

His hand flew to his mouth. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”

“Why not?”

“He said you’d try to fix it with your New York money.”

I muttered a curse.

My brother had been an avid photographer since forever. When he was eighteen, I gifted him a trip to Hawaii for his high school graduation. He fell in love with Kauai’s scenery and Nalani Soriano—in that order—and never looked back. Together, with a modest starter investment from me, they opened Island Memories, a little photography studio in Princeville.

Kaleo tugged my hand. He was sensitive and sweet, like his dad, but more serious. Solemn. “Please don’t tell on me, Uncle Ash.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said through my teeth and stormed back into the house, ready to confront my brother the minute Kal went to bed.