Kalea still did not turn around. “Fine. But only if you swear that what is said stays between the two of us. You can never tell Aloiki.”
“So long as it doesn’t affect him, Lu, or the club, you have yourself a deal.” We were married for nearly five years. Aloiki didn’t know a lot of things that had happened between Kalea and I during that time.
She nodded stiffly. “I’ll see if Mrs. Mahoe is available to take her.” Then she came over, picked up Pua, and the two of them left the room.
I was showeredand dressed by the time Mrs. Mahoe rang the doorbell. The stay-at-home grandma who lived across the street glared at me around Kalea’s body as she took Pualani into her arms. My ears were also not so bad that I couldn’t hear her ask Kalea if she was safe. I considered myself a patient man, but it tookfartoo long for Kalea to hand Pua over with all her supplies. She was stalling, and all three adults in the room knew it.
“Let me guess,” I said as soon as the door finally closed, “the entire neighborhood thinks I bailed on you and our child.”
Normally I didn’t give a fuck what other people thought ofme, but that implication bothered me. Maybe because it was a little too close to home at present with Samantha.
“They drew their own conclusions,” Kalea said without looking at me. She walked back into the kitchen.
I followed. For several long minutes, I held up the doorframe while watching her make the most complicated version of a bowl of cereal I’d ever seen. She even went as far as to count the individual cereal pieces and measure out the milk before pouring it. She also swapped between wanting the banana she’d already cut up for her cereal with strawberries she meticulously quartered.
I waited. She walked over to the table, put her bowl in front of her seat, sat down, realized she forgot a spoon, got back up, went over to the drawer, decided the spoon wasn’t clean enough, washed the spoon in the sink, found a new dishtowel to dry the spoon with, went back over to her seat, and sat back down.
“For the love of god, if you say that your cereal is now too soggy to eat, I am going to find a funnel and jam it down your throat,” I growled.
She glared at me as she ate a giant spoonful of cereal. Her exaggerated crunching was not necessary.
“Crunch all you want, sweetheart. You’re still talking to me today.”
Kalea dropped her eyes to her bowl. She swallowed, but still did not speak.
“Fine.” I stepped forward and dragged out the chair across the table from her, parking my ass in it. “Here’s what I know. Pualani was a preemie, born at thirty-three weeks. Which means you fucked hermakuakanearound New Year’s four years ago. Once, twice, a hundred times… I don’t really give a fuck.” She kept eating, staring down at that bowl like it could save her. “I found out about her paternity three weeks after she was born, and since you haven’t even set the record straight with your neighbors and friends, I can only assume that you’ve told no one about who hermakuakaneis.
“Yet someone found out and is blackmailing you. I can’t figure out a way that it could be hermakuakane, because there’s no one in my life that I care about enough for that news to affect me. And in case you forgot, last night you implied you’ve been keeping secrets to protect me. Which is another topic of conversation we’re going to have.
“So, how am I doing so far?”
Kalea ate a spoonful of cereal. She swallowed hard before saying, “Colder than ice.”
My eyes narrowed. “Well, I never claimed to be Sherlock Holmes. So why don’t you correct me on the parts I got wrong.”
“And destroy the mystery?” She sloshed her cereal around in the bowl. “Where’s the fun in that?”
I didn’t flinch at her vindictive tone. “Fine. Pualani’s at Mrs. Mahoe’s all day. There’s plenty of things around here with her DNA on them. I’ll grab one of those and take it to a lab. Then I’ll go door to door to every man you’ve ever met in your life and collect a sample from him.” My voice deepened as I growled, “One way or another.”
Neo already had a contact for a lab on the Mainland from us running Caroline’s and Samantha’s DNA. Against each other to prove what we already suspected, and to see if either of their DNA pinged against a missing person case. We hadn’t received their results back yet, but should be soon. They estimated six to eight weeks, and it had been about that since Neo suggesting getting them tested. Personally, I wasn’t thrilled about doing so behind Caroline’s back, but also wanted answers without inducing another panic attack, so I agreed.
Kalea froze, her eyes finally coming up to meet mine. “You wouldn’t.”
I leaned forward, folding my arms in front of me on the table. “Try me,” I warned. “Blood, hair, semen… There’s a lot of ways a man leaves behind his DNA. Personally, I’m hoping for a little blood.”
Kalea dropped her spoon. It clattered to the side of the bowl, splattering milk on the tabletop. She pushed the bowl away from her and sat back in the chair. “Why do you have to be such a prick about this? Why does it matter to you who Pua’smakuakaneis?”
“Aside from the fact that you were mywahinewhen you fucked him?” I threw back at her. “How about the fact that it seems someone else also knows his identity and is blackmailing you for money to keep it quiet? So why not let it out in the open? How bad could it possibly be? It can’t be a relative because Aloiki and you would never, and you have no other uncles or cousins, blood related or not. So who else is so important that you’re going to such great lengths to protect him, willing to abandon your daughter for a week to pay the blackmail money you owe to keep that secret?”
Kalea shook her head, but it seemed she was all cried out for the time being. That was good, because I wasn’t sure I could be as hard on her as I needed to be if she started crying again. I just didn’t let her know that.
She scratched the edge of the table with her fingernail. “We were having trouble getting pregnant. Do you remember that?”
“Hard to forget.” We’d tried for two years before we got a positive test, which, I now knew why.
“It was one of those weird twists of fate. The fertility clinic we went to called that same morning. They shared the news with me that you have a very low sperm count. The chances of you getting me pregnant were so low, in fact, that they would classify it as a medical miracle if I did.”
I frowned, because this was news to me. We’d gone to the clinic, both given samples to see why we weren’t conceiving, but Kalea had told me that we were both healthy andshouldbeconceiving. She said the specialist said to just give it more time, and it would happen when it happened. So we kept on trying.