My Beloved: A Thin Love Novella(18)

The spa was mostly quiet, very relaxing and after her facial was completed and the deep tissue massage had her feeling like her bones had gone rubbery, Keira rested in the large massage room, thin curtains separating her from the rest of the bridesmaids as they enjoyed their own bit of pampering.

She felt relaxed, languid, had even gone so far as to turn off her cell and thought the quiet would continue until she heard the lower murmurs on the other side of the curtain, catching Kona’s name. She lay perfectly still, focusing on the private conversation Auntie Malia and another woman whose voice Keira couldn’t place whispered low to each other.

“Cancer, in her bones.”

“Terminal?”

“That’s what she told Malaine. My daughter the only one who still talk story with her.” Malia sighed, the exhale worrying Keira. She could hear the sadness in the woman’s voice, the defeated tone that told Keira whoever was sick had Malia fearful and worried. “She no a good woman. Never was even when I feed her boys, God rest Luka.”

Keira twisted her head, slipping off the table to hear Malia better. Kona’s mother was sick? Dying?

“She was hard, her whole life, yeah? No sweet in her.”

“Except for Kona, yeah.”

“Maybe but she even hurt Kona bad. I hate her for being no good to that boy.”

“Why she so mean?”

Malia sighed, adjusted her body and Keira could hear her body squeak against the chair. “That Samoan, Liam Kaino, he made her that way.”

“He Kona’s father?”

Malia clicked her tongue to the roof of her mouth as though the thought of Kona’s father disgusted her. “He made those boys. He no their father.” She released another disgusted sound, something guttural and annoyed, but adjusted again her seat, squeaking against the leather.

“Kaino said he love my sister, said he want to marry her. He come from money, from New Zealand and Lalei was so happy. Love him too much, I think. Then he goes back to New Zealand, tells Lalei he’ll send for her, but he never did.”

“She never talk to him?”

“Nah. He stay there, stay far from Lalei, but then my sister, she says she having his baby, she need tell him he gonna be a papa.” Malia exhaled again, made a distinct sound, sad and disappointed, then finished speaking. “She get there and Liam say he sorry but he marry this haole from the mainland.”

The sharp gasp of Malia’s friend moved around the room and Keira pulled her towel over her shoulders, frowning for the betrayal Lalei had faced. She could sympathize, though Kona had never known Keira was pregnant when he pushed her away.

“She no tell him about the babies.”

“Why?”

“She say he no have the right to them boys. She say he never know and he didn’t. His haole wife couldn’t get pregnant and my sister want Kaino to die thinking he had no babies. That made her hard, made her hate haoles, made her hate anyone who she think could take Kona from her. Even Luka. He look too much like Kaino. Kona look like our people. She marry that skinny Tonga, Alana and keep his name after he die. Our name, she no want. Lalei a sad, mean woman. So sad.”

“And now she sick?”

“She alone too for what she did to Kona and his boy and pretty haole Keira. Kona no speak with her.”

Keira couldn’t listen anymore. She slipped on her robe and left the room, walking out to the private patio overlooking the ocean. She wasn’t sure how to feel. She hated Kona’s mother, had harbored such a fierce dislike for the woman for all she’d done to Keira, what she’d tried to do to Ransom. A year ago, Keira wouldn’t have batted an eye about Lalei being sick. She doubted she could have even mustered the sympathy to feel bad for Kona at losing his mother. The woman had always been so selfish and vile to everyone but Kona and even then, she’d manipulated him for decades, trying to place him on whatever path she wanted him.

But Keira’s own mother had died six months ago. From what she heard, the illness was painful, lingering and her mother suffered for almost a year before her liver finally failed. When she got the call that the woman was dead, there had been no instant swell of grief, no overwhelming emotional display that leveled Keira. To Keira, her mother died the instant she told Keira to get rid of her baby.

Sixteen years she had kept her mother out of her mind. Keira never thought of her, never wanted to be reminded of her life in New Orleans and her mother’s cruelty. Then after the death she returned to the Lake House. Keira was the only one left to rummage through her mother’s belongings, years of pointless memories sorted and organized into albums and scrapbooks that Keira had no desire to keep.

But one day, Keira came across a box in the attic with her name scrawled across the top. When Keira opened it, all that she thought she knew about her mother fractured.

Inside were pictures, newspaper clippings, sheet music, articles and copies of record charts filling up dozens of scrapbooks and they were all of Keira. Her successes, media and PR materials that the record label insisted she participate in, pictures of Keira accepting her Grammy, speaking quietly, shyly to the press with her trophy in hand. Her mother had documented everything, was proud. Keira knew that from the tiny, elegant handwritten labels, titles that said “Keira’s First Number One” or “My Baby on the Grammys”.

Keira had taken those scrapbooks and held them close to her chest, confused that her mother hadn’t really hated her, that after all these years and everything she tried to force on Keira, she’d really loved her, was proud of her. And it broke Keira’s heart. Cora Michaels, her mother, had been abusive, horrible to Keira, angry that the girl had turned out too much like her father. She’d driven Keira away, kept her away because she hated the baby growing inside her daughter’s belly. She’d hated even more the boy who had put that baby there. It was her rearing, the small-minded bigotry that was engrained into her generation. Her parents, theirs, had only cared about social standing and money—how much they had, how much they could get, and that attitude had left Cora expectant, cold. She’d landed Keira’s father in college, then left him when he no longer wanted to pretend he believed in what she did. Keira had never understood her mother, but those clippings, those proud labels told a different story, and convinced Keira that she’d never really known the woman, either.