Thick & Thin (Thin Love, #3)(76)

“Yeah,” I said, standing in front of my mother to kiss her forehead when she looked at me. “We’ll figure this out.” Over Mom’s head I noticed the darkness descending and the quick swarm of lightening bugs that flew over the water’s surface. Dad needed me and if I was convincing enough, we’d get the answers we wanted, one way or another. “Listen,” I told Aly when Mom went to her chair, slumping against the leather. “Can you stay with them tonight?”

“What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure, but I think Kona has some thoughts.”

“The non-violent kind?”

“Yeah, ko`u aloha, I promise. But I need to get him some things. Can you…” I nodded at my mother as she shook her leg, making her whole chair move. Aly looked back up at me, not hesitating once with her nod or the warm smirk she gave me. The distraction of Cass’s misguided seduction and Sara’s call had put us off the conversation we’d tabled out by the fire pit. Just thinking of it made my chest feel tight and my mind clustered with the realization that she’d kept something so important from me for so long. More than that, Aly had battled her demons without my help. She’d made decisions that I had zero say-so in.

“Will you be all night?” she asked, stepping closer and for a second I didn’t care what Cass had done or why my mother would ever believe Kona would lie to her. Just then, I didn’t think about family drama or a future with no babies. I could only look down at Aly, at the soft angle of her jaw and the lush plump of her bottom lip. I could still taste a hint of her tears on my tongue and feel the greedy rake of her nails against my neck.

When I didn’t answer, Aly moved her head to the side, narrowing her eyes as though she didn’t understand my silence and then the confusion left her features as I bent down, kissing her mouth. “I’ll be a while. Then we’ll deal with all this tomorrow and we’ll figure this out.” Looking down at her, I held her face, moving my fingers along her cheek. “When this is over, we’ll discuss…everything and I’m going to convince you where you belong.”

“Ransom...” Aly shifted her gaze to my mother, but then focused back on me when I tilted her chin up.

“I’m going to remind you every day if necessary that you love me, that we all love you, that I see you, that we need each other and that you cannot be without me. No matter what.” Another kiss, this one harder, leaving no room for indecision and when I looked over her face, Aly had gone a little breathless. “That okay with you?” I didn’t care if it wasn’t and didn’t give her a chance to answer. I moved out of the studio and down the hall, pulling my phone out of my pocket to answer my father’s text.

Kona: Bring me my Tom Ford suit and my black Oxfords. Time to make shit happen. I’ve got a plan, brah.

Ransom: I’m on it and I’m sure as hell with you.





Inside my breast lives a promise.

Broken,

Mended,

Given new life.

It beats,

It pulses,

Until,

The steady pump moves the blood

Until,

There is the force of life

The peak of living.

Until,

Its resurrection is complete.

And that promise

Bumps,

Gives,

Lives once more.





Nineteen





Athletic ability. Strength. The incomprehensible desire to achieve. The predictable need to prove yourself. Kona Hale had given me all of these things. They’d come with the shape of my nose and the sharp cut of my jaw. They’d come with the cleft in my chin and the weird bend in my left pinkie that was identical to my late uncle Luka’s. Hale blood ran thick inside me. Riley blood accompanied it and from my mother’s French ancestors I got an affinity for music, the odd talent of picking at notes, strumming or plucking on instruments until a song I’d heard once was second nature and streaming from whatever musical instruments I found at hand. My temper came with equal parts from both Mom and Dad.

Genetics. DNA—all funny little things I’d never much appreciated until Koa and Mack came along mimicking the weird things my parents did, the same strange quirks I thought were mine alone. It seemed, if today’s trip downtown was any indication, that my father’s genetic makeup did not extend to the child he was supposed to have fathered with his ex-girlfriend Simone.

I hadn’t expected much when Dad had me trail him, sitting across the sidewalk on a wrought iron bench as he waited outside the large building housing a bank of offices, one entire floor belonging to the law offices of Mayeaux and Miles, the latter of which Simone had hired to handle the paternity suit. A little nosing around, a short phone call to Ethan and my father knew who Simone’s lawyer was and when the deposition was happening. He’d also discovered the other girl, a twenty-two-year-old from Arkansas, was Cass’s cousin. Just as greedy, just as manipulative. Ethan had discovered that her child was eighteen months old, with a birth certificate that claimed “Unknown” as the father. That one would be easy to dismiss. It was Simone my father wanted to focus on and to do that he needed his Tom Ford and Oxfords.

If I’d expected him to charge toward the woman when she emerged from the tall stone building—slowing as she navigated the black steps, one hand sliding down the silver steel railing as she went—then I was wrong. Kona was smoother than that. And, it seemed, more perceptive than me. Of course, he’d been with Simone for two years before he and Mom reconnected. He knew her the only way a man knows the woman he’s been with. I could tell you without looking at Aly when she had a headache because she grumbled under breath like she tried talking herself out of the pain. I knew when she was depressed, clinging to memories of her childhood that seemed to creep up on her with no real cause at all. When that happened, she’d sing old Creole songs she only knew half the words to because her grann had a terrible memory.