to watch Kai. “And when…Keeana…well. It’s hard not to love that little girl.” The admission had cost her, and she wondered what was behind the look Kai gave her. He continued to watch her, looking half torn between wanting to grab her and hold her, and fighting the inclination to tell her to fuck off.
Gia couldn’t blame him. She knew how stupid she’d been.
“Well, I can understand that,” Kona said, pulling out his cell. “I’m going to act like every proud father on the planet and bore you with pictures of my pēpēs.” He flashed through images of Keira, who didn’t look a day older to Gia than she did when they were in college. The woman was still beautiful, her smile still bright and wide as she held two children in her arms. One was a girl with enormous black eyes and a riot of ringlet curls that fell down her back. She couldn’t be more than two and smiled a wide, toothy grin at the camera. “Mack…Makana,” Kona said, his smile broad and his eyes soft. “She’s two, and I’m useless when it comes to her. She had me wrapped around her finger the second she came out.”
Gia laughed, catching Kai’s slow grin across the table. “Like her mom?”
“Exactly,” Kona said, scanning to the next picture. “This is Koa. Named for my late kupunakane…”
Gia’s eyes burned and something thick lodged in her throat as a whip of memory raced into her mind. Another Koa, that sweet old man who deflected his daughter so she and Luka could be alone.
“When did he…pass away? Your grandfather?”
Kona’s frown was quick when he glanced at her. “Just after my first Super Bowl win. Cancer.” He nodded to the image, taking half a second longer to look away from Gia’s expression before he showed her his Koa. Of course he’d be curious about her question. Kona never knew that she’d met his grandfather. He never knew anything about her and Luka.
“Koa is three and a half and a holy terror. Just like I was. But he dotes on his baby sister and thinks his big brother is a superhero.” Again, Kona nodded, flipping to the last picture. “Here he is, our oldest. Ransom.”
“He’s gotten big,” Kai said, leaning forward to see the picture on Kona’s phone. “It’s only been two years since that family reunion, yeah?”
“He’s been at CPU for three years. Packed on a good ten pounds of muscle. Works hard.” Kona offered his cell to Gia, his smile wavering when she held it in her hand. “Who does he remind you of?”
It was cruel. That face. That smile. The twist of his mouth. The right cheek dimple. All these small seemingly inconsequential things that should not have meant anything at all individually, when Gia looked at them. If it had only been the dimple on this boy’s face. Only the smile or that twisting smirk then maybe she would have been able to see it and feel nothing but the long buried ache that had lived in the recesses of her heart like the fracture she told Kai had never really healed.
But all of these things together? On that tall, wide frame, in that uniform?
Gia could not help the well of sorrow that rose in her chest. She could not stop the heat that flooded from her gut and seemed to rise, to surface as she looked down and saw the cruelest memory of her lost love living again in the beautiful, breathless face of his nephew.
She hoped, with her head down and her hair obscuring her face that they would not see. Gia hoped that one look would be sufficient. The tears would dry the second she passed the phone back to Kona. But she seemed unable to do anything but stare down at that smiling face; stare and watch and wonder what would have…could have been for what felt like the millionth time.
It was stupid. It was pointless. It would change nothing at all.
Gia did it anyway.
“Hey,” Kona said, leaning forward, his hand against her arm when she looked away from him. “Gia?”
The cell vibrated against her palm when she gripped it, then stilled as she passed it back to Kona, her focus on the activity of the patrons she could see outside the doors. She tried to be discreet. Gia tried to use the back of her hand so Kai and Kona would not see her wiping her face. But there was no hiding from them.