Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)(99)

It took me a minute, but then I remember the line, something Mom had said through the years, that later I’d read in high school, something that stuck through repetition. “Morrison?” I asked him and Dad nodded.

“It was our…” he shook his head, like the explanation didn’t matter, “it was us wanting to prove that this thing between us wasn’t temporary. Thick love is best. Thick love is…it’s when you know.”

I sat up then, leaning on my forearms and Dad went back to his constant gawk of my mother, brushing away the hair from her face, looking a little more lost than he had in the waiting room.

“It’s when you know what?”

When my father looked at me, there was something telling in his expression, something that made him grin and I felt as though he’d been waiting for me to ask that question. “It’s when you know you’ve found the one that can pick up the pieces when you let your heart get broken.”

Kona Hale wasn’t a philosopher, but at that moment I realized I had never heard anything more profound.

I watched him as he clung to her, moving his cheek to her chest and his arm around her waist. It was a position I’d frequently found them in—him hanging on to her like she was his salvation, her with her fingers running through his hair. Leann had once told me they’d always been that way, needed those subtle, almost unconscious touches to keep them centered to the earth, and to each other. I felt almost like I didn’t belong in that small room just then, like I was somehow in the way of a moment that was one-sided. They’d loved each other for so long, so fiercely and had since they were kids. Since they were my age. Since they were Aly’s and my age.

I leaned back, rested my shoulders on the wall behind me, watching my parents but finally taking a moment to remember what Aly had been like tonight on the stage. And even afterward, when my panic had me lashing out at her, screaming, she’d taken what I’d given her, and fed it back to me.

We were not my parents. There was no epic, life-changing love between us, but there was the hope that we might have that one day. After all, she had held me when the roses in my car reminded me of an anniversary I never wanted to celebrate. She took the bitter, angry venom I gave her and didn’t pacify me with words that meant nothing. She fought back and I liked it because no one else had done that for me before. Emily had been the sweetest girl, but she’d been a girl scared of hurting anyone’s feelings. Aly was a woman who wasn’t afraid to stomp on my toes to make me realize how stupid I’d been.

My eyes felt heavy and I could barely keep them open, but then a movement from the bed, a slow, easy movement woke me up. It wasn’t Dad. He hadn’t moved; he still held my mother. But my mother…when she blinked, when her hand with the I.V. moved, when it rested on my father’s head, my heart sped up.

Mom’s mouth curved slowly upwards, as though the sensations around her were starting to come into focus. The first thing she recognized was the feel of my father’s heavy body laying where he always did, next to her, expecting her touch. And she did touch him—slow, barely moving strokes through his hair, once, twice and then my father jerked awake.

“Keira?” He raised up on the bed, holding her face as I pushed the call button. “Wildcat…no, don’t take off the mask,” he told her moving her hands away from the oxygen mask. “Baby…”

She seemed to realize, then, that she was in the hospital. She stopped fumbling at the mask, and instead started to look around. When she saw me, she feebly tried to offer her hand to me, and I quickly crossed the room to gather it into my own. We had a few moments to hold her, for Dad to kiss her gently before her room filled up with medical personnel. There was activity then, lots of it—the quick action of the two nurses coming in to check on her, followed by a doctor who questioned Mom quietly, calmly, and then spoke to Dad after his examination. And then, when she was more alert, stronger, and sitting up in her bed, we had a visitor.

My baby sister was tiny, much smaller than Koa had been. Still, watching my father hold her against Mom’s chest, I thought that she fit so easily, so naturally into the ohana my parents had built.

“Makana,” Dad said, holding her like she was made of glass, like he had never seen anything like her before. “Keira because she is beautiful. Makana because she is a gift.”

And Keira Makana Riley-Hale, that precious baby with the mouthful name and beautiful caramel skin like mine, like my little brother’s, held our father’s finger with the tightest grip and leaned against my mother’s mouth when she kissed that tiny cheek.

My mother hadn’t simply been there to pick up my father’s broken pieces. She’d been the one to hold his heart in her hands so that the children she gave him, the light she put back into his life covered him, filled him with love so thick he would happily have drown in it.

Until that day when my mother teetered so close to death I had not fully understood what had drawn my parents together all those years ago. Now I did. It wasn’t just love. It was the potential of who they’d become together.

It was the same potential I’d squandered that day with Aly when I stupidly told my father I’d never love anyone like I had Emily. It was those careless words that had Aly retreating, disappearing from the hospital.

I couldn’t take back those words, but I could try, I hoped, to recapture the potential of us, if she’d let me.