stop?” he asked her, knowing she understood him. “The pain…will it ever go away?”
Gia watched him and he wasn’t sure what to make of the expression on her face. He didn’t think she was sad about Keeana. They’d only been around each other twice. Gia had spent the week helping him, helping Keola deal with this. She didn’t know her well, so he knew that look came from somewhere else.
She shook her head, gaze moving all over his face before she squeezed his fingers and took the towel from his shoulders to dry his arms. “It’s like a scar no one can see.” She glanced at him, eyebrows moving up like she wanted to see if he understood. He nodded, moving his chin to get her to continue. “It’s like a fracture that heals. There will always be a trace of it deep inside you. It will grow with you. It will move when you do. But…” She swallowed, her fingers stopping to curl around his hand. “It won’t ever be gone. You learn to live with it. Sometimes, you can train yourself to forget, maybe for an hour, sometimes for whole days. But that scar, that loss, it’s part of you now.”
Gia paused, dropping the towel to hold Kai’s hands, skimming her fingertips over his palms. “You’re luckier than I was because you’ve been blessed.”
Kai covered her fingers with his hand, bringing her attention back to his face. “What do you mean?”
“Because she left you with something of hers that will always be here.” Her voice was soft and there was a twitch of movement that pulsed across her bottom lip as she spoke. “She lives and breathes and laughs every time Keola does. You look at your girl and you see Keeana and you always will.”
It was true. Keola had always favored her mother. For that, Kai had been happy, now it was bittersweet. Now he wasn’t so sure that similarity had been such a great gift. “I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.”
Gia shook her head, opening her mouth as though she needed to fight the rush of words that threatened to spill out of her. “To have a reminder? To have part of her here? To be able to touch her and be reminded of the gift her life was? There’s no curse in that, Kai. That’s magic. That’s a miracle. I…would have…”
Kai frowned, realizing how stupid he’d sounded and how obnoxious she might find him.
But Gia didn’t yell. She didn’t tell him he was a prick. Instead, she stared down at the towel, fiddling with the corner like speaking so honestly and looking at him while she did it was something she couldn’t quite manage. “Well, I think you’re blessed.”
He leaned forward, taking her hands again, focusing on the small scar that ran across her knuckles. He rubbed it with his thumb, loving the heat from her skin, thinking it was the only thing that kept him calm at the moment. “I’m lost.”
“You’ll find your way,” she told him, keeping her voice even, her tone sweet. “You’ve never struck me as a man who could ever be helpless. You’re strong when you need to be and right now, your daughter needs all your strength.”
Keola needed him more than ever. She needed him to be brave. She needed her father to tell her he could protect her. He could save her. But could he? When Nalani had called him, her voice frantic, to tell him about the accident, it was the fear of Keola being dead too that had made him lose himself. That fear had only grown since he came back to Maui and she spotted him at the hospital, running straight into his arms, gripping his collar and begging him, absolutely begging him to never leave her.
“You won’t go too, will you, makuakāne? Please promise me…promise me you won’t go too.”
Kai had lost it then. He could barely hold onto his composure now and dropped his head, not wanting Gia to see his face, worried what she might think of him if he went on crying and sobbing like he had no control over himself.
But she was not a woman cowed by weakness. Gia was a woman in control and just then, she seemed intent on making Kai lose his completely.
“There’s no one here to see you, and there’s no weakness in this pain,” she said. Gia knelt in front of him, taking his hands from his face. “It hurts and