“I just… I owed someone money, and I needed to get it elsewhere if I couldn’t get it from the farm.”
I lowered the beer from my mouth, my eyes narrowing. “You owedwhomoney?”
I left her a house with no mortgage, and she still drove the car I had bought her for her twenty-first birthday. Even with the cost of utilities, taxes, gas, and food, a fulltime job should more thancover that. Why would she have needed to borrow money? And if she did, why wouldn’t she have borrowed from Aloiki or a bank?
“That’s none of your business?—”
“You abandoned your daughter for a fuckingweekso you could go get money elsewhere to pay back some mystery loan to some mystery person, and you don’t think that’s my business?” I repeated back to her, sarcasm dripping heavily from my voice. “Did you take up a gambling or drug habit I’m not aware of?”
I hadn’t seen any signs of that over the past three weeks. She hadn’t been sketchy or jumpy. Then again, I was at work at random hours. But still, if she was an addict, I should have picked up onsomething.
“Even if I was, that still is none of your business. You walked out of my life, remember? Youleft meat the fucking hospital with a sick three-week-old baby! Do you remember that? No note, just that fucking paternity test. You abandoned me!”
“You slept with another man and hadhisbaby. And trust me when I say that my leaving is the only reason you’re still breathing today.”
She paled. “You… You wanted to hurt me?”
I put the beer bottle on the kitchen counter behind me and stormed over to her. “I just found out my wife had a fuckingaffair,” I growled into her face. “I wanted to hurt a lot of things.”
“I never…” She couldn’t even look me in the eye. Tears trailed down her cheeks. “I prayed she was yours. I wanted her to be yours.”
“Well if you’d kept your legs closed, there wouldn’t have been a question if she was mine.”
Kalea gagged, her hand coming up to slap across her mouth. She bolted past me and over to the sink where she started spewing up whatever she and Pua had had for dinner. I let out a long sigh before heading over next to her to gather her hair up in my fist. I had no idea why I couldn’t just let her suffer on herown.
Something I’d come to realize over the past three weeks of being here was that I didn’t hate Kalea. I hated what she’d done, and I couldn’t forgive what she’d done, but I didn’t hate her. In some weird, fucked-up way, I missed her. Even when we weren’t talking, being near her felt natural, familiar.
She coughed and spluttered. I reached into the cabinet to my left with the hand that wasn’t holding up her hair and grabbed out a cup. Then I turned on the water to fill it. She blindly took it, sipping a little and sloshing it around in her mouth for a second before spitting it back out. She repeated that process twice before she drank the remaining water.
Her knees buckled, and she started to sink to the floor. I let go of her hair so it didn’t pull as she twisted, her back riding the smooth cabinet all the way down. Tears still fell from her cheeks and the smell of bile filled the room. I took the cup, refilled it, and handed it down to her before I started to clean up the sink, running the garbage disposal several times to help get rid of the smell.
Then I picked up my beer and parked my ass on the tile floor next to her.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I encouraged. Based on what just happened, I half expected her to tell me she was pregnant again.
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“You won’t,” I corrected. “You didn’t tell me then and you won’t tell me now. How could you even contemplate us patching things up if you can’t even be honest with me? Who do you owe money to, and do you still owe money to him?”
Leaning back against the cabinet with her eyes closed, Kalea shook her head again. “You’re not listening to me, Tangaloa. Ican’t.”
My eyes narrowed. Can’t. “What the fuck does that mean? Why can’t you tell me?”
Kalea dropped her head into her hands, her shoulders shaking. “You’re not the only one of the two of us who loved with their whole body and soul. You aren’t the only one who would doanythingto protect the other.”
I stared at her, feeling like I was standing at the top of a volcano just waiting for that final shove to push me in. “Kalea…” The words nearly got caught in my throat, but I forced them out. “Are you being blackmailed?”
Chapter Ten
Kalea stiffened, and I was sitting close enough to her that I felt it. In that moment, I knew I was right. Regardless of her vigorously shaking her head and insistent denial that spewed from her mouth a second later, there was no doubt in my mind that I was right.
She dropped her hands from her face to the floor, poising herself to stand. I grabbed her shoulders first, leaning over her without pressing my body weight down on her. I wanted her undivided attention, not to crush her.
“What the fuck is going on, Kalea? Who’s blackmailing you? Is it Pualani’smakuakane?” Her father? How? Why? To keep his identity a secret? No, wouldn’t it be the other way around if that was the case? Maybe someoneelseknew Pua’smakuakane’s identity and they were blackmailing Kalea to not reveal Pualani’s existence to him? I wasn’t an expert on family court, and it had certainly been a process to have my name removed from the birth certificate. But once paternity was proven, the father would get rights.
Was Kalea not willing to share her rights? Wouldn’t that help her with child support?
Kalea continued to shake her head. I didn’t understand what she was negating. Her reaction was proof enough that I’d guessed correctly, so why was she still insisting on denying it?