Page 125 of Between Hello and Goodbye

Chapter Twenty-Four

The rains had hardly let up for a week and the radio in my Jeep said a storm was coming.

“No shit,” I muttered. A storm had begun the second I got that fucking phone call from Cap and showed no signs of quitting.

I’d just come from a meeting with my business manager. I’d assigned Al Jacobs to look intoIsland Memoriesand tell me where it stood. After a thorough audit, he discovered that at the time of the accident, the business had been on a profitable upswing.

“But the family-run aspect was its greatest asset,” Al had said. “You can hire new people, but I don’t know that it’d be the same.”

Not even close. Nalani’s warm smile and charisma and Morgan’s photography made their business what it had been. I couldn’t hire anyone to take their place—they were irreplaceable—and even if I did, I was stretched too thin to keep tabs on it.

“Sell it,” I’d said, the bile rising in my throat. “Whatever it makes, put in a trust for Kaleo’s college.”

“Very good. And the house…”

Morgan and Nalani’s house, Al told me, would have to be torn down. It and three other homes on their road were one bad storm away from sliding down to the ocean.

Kal could never go home again.

“Move everything to storage,” I’d replied.

“Everything?” Al frowned. “Maybe you could hold a sale to get rid of—”

“I’m notgetting ridof one goddamn thing that belonged to my brother,” I’d thundered. I eased a shaking breath. “Storage. All of it.”

Al had nodded, but he didn’t get it. Like the people who wanted Morgan’s urn in the water. You giveaway all the stuff and you sell the business and you put the ashes in the ocean and then what do you have left?

Nothing. There’s nothing left.

I pulled into the drive of my house just as the sun was setting. Chloe’s car was there, of course. She picked Kal up after school every day and stayed with him until I came home from work. Captain Reyes had told me that starting next week, I’d have to take a few twenty-fours. The fire station was operating on a skeleton crew, and I had to step up.

Exhaustion seeped so deep in me, it was in my soul. Stretched to the breaking point. If something didn’t change, it was all going to fall apart. I needed help. Glue, to hold it all together.

Inside, I could hear Chloe bustling around in the kitchen, likely making dinner though I never asked her to. Kal was doing homework at the living room coffee table.

I ruffled his hair. “How was your day?”

“Good.”

He’d always been a quieter kid, but I wished he’d tell me more. I wished I knew what to ask. For a kid who’d lost both his parents several weeks ago, he seemed inhumanly “good.” His grief counselor told me kids were resilient but now I had to deliver more bad news. Another loss.

I knelt beside him. “So I need to tell you something, buddy.”

He looked at me. “We can go home now?”

Christ.

He’d been asking me that nearly every day, and I’d ducked and weaved, but there was no more evading it now.

“That’s just it. I got final word from the surveyors, and they said it’s too dangerous because of the threat of mudslides. A few houses on the street can’t be lived in anymore.”

Including yours.

He frowned. “We can’t go back?”

He kept saying “we” because he correctly assumed I would come live with him in his old house. I’d have moved to a colony on Mars if that’s what he wanted, but I couldn’t give him the simplest of his wants—the only home he’d ever known.

“No, buddy. I’m sorry.”