Pérez left, the doors behind him swinging shut with a thump and Kai stirred, pushing away from her to rub his palms in his eyes and make attempts at controlling his breathing. When he seemed calmer, when minutes had passed and the sobbing ebbed to silent tears, he looked up at Gia likely searching for answers to the million questions he had. But the only thing he could manage to say was, “What do I…do? How…”
“I’ll take care of it,” she told him, silencing Kai with a soft kiss before she pulled him back against her chest. He no longer cried, but still held onto Gia like she was the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. She remembered this ache. It would not go away for a long time. “I promise,” she told him, moving her fingers back into his hair, wishing she could absorb this pain, settle it inside her where the dull ache of Luka’s loss still slept. Instead, she hung onto Kai. “I’ll take care of everything.”
15.
KAI
KAI DIDN’T HAVE A MOTHER. There’d been no one watching him when he was small and needed attention. There’d been no one who cared enough to look after him when he got the chicken pox at eight or the flu on his tenth birthday. Nalani had been there when she could, sneaking out from whatever foster home she was in to find a way and check up on Kai, but it wasn’t the same as having a mother.
Until Keeana, he’d never understood how important they were to a kid. He never thought past Keola and Keeana and the idea that they’d always be together.
But Kai buried Keeana with Keola at his side, her small hand shaking in his as a rain came through the graveyard and drizzled everyone gathered to tell her goodbye. He’d stood there at the open earth, eyes burning and swollen, his little girl clinging to him thinking about mothers and lovers and how Keeana had been both to him. He’d known none better. She’d been a bossy freshman when they met, breaking up a fight between Kai and Dexter Jillian when the asshole picked on Kai for living in a foster home. Keeana was loud enough, bold enough that Dexter went running when she threatened to knock him out. She was strong enough that Kai’s grumpy reply of “I can take care of myself,” got little more than a snort and eye roll from her before she said, “then do it next time, dork.”
She’d been his friend first. Then his love. She’d taught Kai that family came from the love you made with the people you cared the most about. It rarely had much to do with blood.
She’d given him a home and a child and let him go when he wouldn’t walk away on his own.
He owed her everything.
How the hell was he supposed to raise their daughter without her? How could he manage not to mess this up?
“She looked beautiful,” Nalani told her brother. Kai smelled her perfume before she walked out of the patio and moved to sit next to him on the wooden stairs that led away from the home Kai had bought for Keeana and onto the beach. “But, Kee was always nani, wasn’t she?”
He nodded, not sure if he’d be able to offer his big sister much more than gravelly noises he tried to pass off as words. Between his feet on the stairs, Kai hid an old, but only half full bottle of Four Rose’s Single Barrel Bourbon. He planned to spend the next few weeks blindingly drunk. Or, at least, that had been the initial game plan.
Until he remembered that he was all Keola had left.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked his sister, glancing at her when she sat next to him, grabbing the bottle from the steps. Kai held his face in his hands, trying hard to keep from letting the day, the circumstance overwhelm him. “She’s not even nine yet, and I don’t know if New Orleans is the right place for her.”
“You’re her makuakāne, little brah. The right place for her is where you are.”
He hated when she made sense. Normally, Nalani would be smug when that happened, but today wasn’t the day for her attitude. She seemed to know it.
Kai shook his head, taking his bottle back from his sister after he thought she’d stolen enough and poured the bourbon back, the warm liquor coating his raw throat.