Between Hello and Goodbye(83)

Viv went back to her menu while I contemplated that future. In flashes, I saw myself going out, meeting up with Jack Phillips, possibly having a relationship with him that lasted more than one night. Working at my job, lunch dates with Viv, shopping, dinners out… None of it was terrible and it was all completely wrong.

The dam I’d built in me to hold back the pain of missing Asher began to waver. Cracks were forming. The place in my heart where he lived was a throbbing ache, and tears rushed up in a torrent.

I stood up on shaking legs. “I have to go.”

Viv frowned. “We just got here. What about lunch?”

“Sorry.” My voice was a croak. “I can’t…”

“Girl, you are so weird lately, I don’t even know what to do with you. It’s like you’re not the same person anymore.”

“I suppose that’s true,” I said and shouldered my purse.

Viv’s martini arrived, which seemed to mollify her. She heaved a sigh. “Drinks this Friday at least?”

The automatic, Sure, I’ll call you rose to my lips, but I smiled through the impending deluge of sobs instead.

“Goodbye, Viv,” I said, because in that moment, I knew I wasn’t going to see her again.



I made it to my condo just in time. No sooner had the door shut than the dam burst. The keys dropped from my hands as great heaving sobs rolled through me like waves in a tsunami. Sobs so deep and hard, my hands begin to shake, and I felt dizzy.

I sucked in deep breaths, staring wildly around until my frantic gaze landed on the hall closet. Asher’s jacket. I needed something to hold on to or I was going to break apart.

I opened the closet and wrapped my arms around the jacket, sobbing into the lapel, inhaling the remnants of his cologne that was fading away. I clenched and unclenched the fabric, sagging on it, straining the hanger. And then my grasping fingers felt a hard lump in one of the pockets.

I slipped my hand inside and touched something covered in velvet. Slowly, I withdrew a box.

“Oh my God.”

It was black and small and most definitely the kind that might hold a ring. Then, like a dream from another lifetime, I remembered that dinner, Asher saying he couldn’t wait any longer… He reached into his pocket and instead of drawing out this box, he pulled out his phone that carried nothing but tragedy.

The jacket slipped off the hanger and I sat on the floor with it in my lap, the box in my hands.

“Oh, Asher.”

And then the tears that fell were warm and soft, my breathing easier, as some of the cracks in my heart began to fill with hope .





Chapter Twenty-Four



The rains had hardly let up for a week and the radio in my Jeep said a storm was coming.

“No shit,” I muttered. A storm had begun the second I got that fucking phone call from Cap and showed no signs of quitting.

I’d just come from a meeting with my business manager. I’d assigned Al Jacobs to look into Island Memories and tell me where it stood. After a thorough audit, he discovered that at the time of the accident, the business had been on a profitable upswing.

“But the family-run aspect was its greatest asset,” Al had said. “You can hire new people, but I don’t know that it’d be the same.”

Not even close. Nalani’s warm smile and charisma and Morgan’s photography made their business what it had been. I couldn’t hire anyone to take their place—they were irreplaceable—and even if I did, I was stretched too thin to keep tabs on it.

“Sell it,” I’d said, the bile rising in my throat. “Whatever it makes, put in a trust for Kaleo’s college.”

“Very good. And the house…”

Morgan and Nalani’s house, Al told me, would have to be torn down. It and three other homes on their road were one bad storm away from sliding down to the ocean.

Kal could never go home again.

“Move everything to storage,” I’d replied.

“Everything?” Al frowned. “Maybe you could hold a sale to get rid of—”

“I’m not getting rid of one goddamn thing that belonged to my brother,” I’d thundered. I eased a shaking breath. “Storage. All of it.”

Al had nodded, but he didn’t get it. Like the people who wanted Morgan’s urn in the water. You giveaway all the stuff and you sell the business and you put the ashes in the ocean and then what do you have left?

Nothing. There’s nothing left.

I pulled into the drive of my house just as the sun was setting. Chloe’s car was there, of course. She picked Kal up after school every day and stayed with him until I came home from work. Captain Reyes had told me that starting next week, I’d have to take a few twenty-fours. The fire station was operating on a skeleton crew, and I had to step up.

Exhaustion seeped so deep in me, it was in my soul. Stretched to the breaking point. If something didn’t change, it was all going to fall apart. I needed help. Glue, to hold it all together.

Inside, I could hear Chloe bustling around in the kitchen, likely making dinner though I never asked her to. Kal was doing homework at the living room coffee table.

I ruffled his hair. “How was your day?”

“Good.”

He’d always been a quieter kid, but I wished he’d tell me more. I wished I knew what to ask. For a kid who’d lost both his parents several weeks ago, he seemed inhumanly “good.” His grief counselor told me kids were resilient but now I had to deliver more bad news. Another loss.