Page 22 of Between Hello and Goodbye

Kaleo blinked up at me. “What do you do with the women, Uncle Ash?”

“He has sleepovers,” Nalani said, giving her husband’s arm a light punch.

“Shy?” I snorted and tore into a rib. “Sure. That’s me.”

“But you’re not evenhaving a sleepoverwith her,” Morgan persisted.

Nalani nodded. “This one feels different. The way you talked about her—”

“I didn’t talk about her any differently than any other call,” I said. “Though I now deeply regret saying anything at all.”

Morgan spoke as if he hadn’t heard me. “You have the next four days off. What else are you going to do?”

“It wouldn’t kill you to show Faith the island,” Nalani said. “She came all this way.”

“Yeah, Asher. She came all this way,” Morgan echoed, the two of them blinking and grinning like idiots.

For a second, they almost got me. I didn’t have any plans but to hang with some guys from the firehouse, maybe surf, maybe play video games. And sure, maybe lately I’d been feeling a few twinges of…something. I wasn’t fuckinglonelybut…

But getting there?

I shoved away that feeling of want and buried it under painful memories. Morgan had been able to get over our fucked-up childhood—a major victory. I’d done everything in my power to not let it take root in him the way it had in me. My pain ran deep, and I used it to keep me from being betrayed. I didn’t want towantanything, ever again.

I pushed my plate aside. “What’s for dessert?”

“She seems brave,” Kaleo said, tossing me the baseball in the yard as the sky darkened to deep purple above us.

“Who does?”

“That Faith lady.”

I frowned and tossed the ball back. “You were listening to all that?”

“I like to listen.” Kal caught the ball in his mitt with a natural ease and chucked it back.

“That’s the truth. How do you know she’s brave?”

“A helicopter lifted her into the air, and she wasn’t scared. I’d be scared.”

“She handled it pretty well,” I admitted.

“Because she’s brave,” Kaleo said. “It sucks she hurt herself. Remember that time I skinned my knee?”

The falling dark hid my smile. I’d lost count of how many times my nephew skinned his knee. The ball went back and forth between us.

“I remember.”

“I still got to go on the field trip to Waimea Canyon,” Kal said.

“What’s your point?”

“It would’ve sucked if I had to miss it.”

“I’d have just taken you the next week.”

“But the Faith lady doesn’t have someone to take her next week. She’s missing the canyon and everything else.”

Not for the first time, I noted my nephew was a lot smarter than any seven-year-old needed to be.