Chapter 11 #3
“I’ll send someone over to protect you,” I told Kalea, not looking at her. “I’ll still avenge what was done to you. But I can’t be with you.”
“I don’t understand… Is it me? Am I not—”
I stopped her mid-word, spinning around quickly to gather her up into my arms. “Don’t ever think that this is about you.
You’re perfect, beautiful, and incredible.
But I can’t be with you, Kalea.” I kissed her forehead.
“Our history needs to stay where it is. I want to repair our friendship, rebuild that trust to what it once was, but I can’t be your lover or your partner.
Not because of what was done to you,” I added to ensure she knew.
“Maybe you don’t believe me now, but you will eventually.
This is for the best.” I stepped away from her.
“I’ll be outside until someone else arrives to watch over you. ”
I rubbed my tired eyes, feeling like the inside of my lids had turned to sandpaper. “Are you fucking with me right now? How do we have nothing?”
It was the day before Aloiki and Lu’s wedding, and I was barely holding onto my sanity.
This meeting was just Kayl and Neo. Lucifer had been called away to deal with something at the youth center, and Bacon had something going on with the renter he had on a connecting piece of land.
I knew that cottage existed, because we used to use it as a fort when we were kids, but I hadn’t been near it since my age had turned double-digits, and I was a bit surprised to learn Bacon had a renter in it.
He must have fixed it up when he bought the property, because it certainly hadn’t been in a livable condition when I was a child.
Mako was staying with Kalea. They’d met a few times over the years, and as our Cleaner put it, why wouldn’t he want to stay and protect the damsel in distress?
The temptation to get drunk again had been strong, and it was a bit of an eye opener to realize just how regularly I partook in the hard stuff.
I hadn’t touched a single drop of alcohol since that revelation, which was likely adding to my already irritable state.
I wasn’t saying I was sober forever more, but at least for a little bit.
I needed to work on myself, and right the wrongs done to Kalea, if I ever wanted to have a hope of being worthy of Caroline and Samantha.
Tuesday morning, I left a message for Caroline.
Her phone went straight to voicemail, and I wasn’t sure if that was because she had blocked me, her phone was off, or she had Neo set it so all her calls went to voicemail and was treating her phone like it was a portable answering machine. Regardless, I hoped she listened to it:
“Hey, it’s me. I hope you and Samantha are doing okay.
There’s so much that I need to apologize to you for—both of you.
But I can’t apologize for falling in love with you.
I should, it would be the right and honorable thing to do, but we already know I’m neither of those things.
What I can promise you is peace, Caroline.
Peace of knowing that I won’t be around, that I won’t be there to pressure you.
I’ll still look after you. I always will.
I miss both of you so badly, it feels like there’s an open wound in my soul.
I’m giving you the space to grow and heal, to figure out who you are as a woman and a mother.
I may not have kept you locked in a basement, but I still kept you locked up.
How can you explore who you are with me shackled around your ankles?
“So here’s my promise to you, and I’m sorry for this message being so long.
Then again, you don’t have to erase it to make room on the tape so maybe you’ll want to keep it and play it again later.
Anyway, this is my promise: I’m working on bettering myself.
To also figure out who I am without you.
Four years feels like an eternity, right?
I wanted to offer a year, but you’d only be eighteen then.
What if you wanted to go to college? What if you needed more time to forgive me?
Then I wondered, is four years too long?
What if she forgot me? And that’s why I chose it.
I don’t want you to forget me, but I also know that I need to give you enough time for you to choose me.
For you to discover and grow into the incredible woman I have no doubt you’ll be.
And then if you choose to, you can come to me.
“And I’ll still be here, Caroline. I’m not going anywhere.
I’m just going to be in the shadows rather than standing in your path.
Kiss Samantha for me, and tell her how much I love her and miss her.
Tell her I’m sorry I had to leave her too.
She’s the daughter of my heart, and if she’ll have me in four years, there would be no greater honor than to become her father.
“I won’t end this message with a goodbye or a declaration of love that is so sappy even I want to roll my eyes at it. Instead, I’ll just leave it with see you in four years… You know, after I see you at the wedding. But after that, I’ll see you in four years.”
Apparently I turned into a babbling hūpō, an idiot, when I didn’t rehearse or even think ahead about what I was going to say to her.
And after that embarrassing phone call, I threw myself into my work and solving the problem of Kalea’s blackmailer.
I did not consider it stooping low when I told Mako to “try and get his name out of her by any means necessary”.
Even if it did give one of my club brothers carte blanche to seduce my ex-wife.
I didn’t know, nor did I want to know, the details of any attempts Mako made to try to get the information out of Kalea, but he’d clearly failed. As had Kayl and Neo.
“Look, you told me to go as far back as birth if I had to,” Neo complained.
We were at my warehouse in Kalihi Kai, which was conveniently hidden between an Distribution Center and a Subway, and across the street from the Ke’ehi Boat Harbor.
I’d been living here since leaving Kalea’s house Monday morning.
“The woman is thirty years old, that’s a lot of men she could have met in her lifetime! She got around, you know.”
“Watch it,” I growled, pointing a finger at them.
“I’m not saying sex,” Neo backtracked. “I mean in general. Without knowing what she’s being blackmailed with, there’s no way to tell who.
We’re not looking for a hook in a shoal but one specific fish that just happened to see or hear something at a specific moment in time that he is now using against her. ”
My dark mood did not improve at their explanation. I turned my attention to Kayl. “What about you? Any luck with Pua’s DNA?”
We got back Caroline’s and Samantha’s results a few days ago, which confirmed what I already suspected: they were not biologically related.
I didn’t know how Samantha had come into Caroline’s care, and it didn’t matter.
Caroline might be young, but she was clearly Samantha’s mother in every way that counted.
Unfortunately, the results also came back negative for missing persons cases for both of them as well.
It had been a good idea, but defiantly a bust.
“Your guy’s not in our database,” Kayl answered my question.
“I had to open a fake report to even justify running that test, and had to call in a favor with a forensic analyst I know to jump the extremely backlogged line of DNA tests that have to be run for legitimate cases.” When I stepped forward, Kayl put his hands up in surrender.
“Not saying this isn’t a legitimate case.
It’s Kalea, of course I’m doing all I can.
I just meant that it’s not as easy to run DNA as movies and shows make it out to be.
” When I didn’t advance further, Kayl put his hands back down, crossing his arms over his chest. “Look, it was a long shot that he would have been in our system anyway. And it might cost a pretty penny, but sending any future samples out to a private lab might be faster and more reliable.”
I was running out of patience. “I went through her neighbors’ trash.” I pulled out zip lock bags to show the samples I brought. “But six men who used to live in our neighborhood at the time of Pualani’s conception have since moved away.”
“I did mail her DNA into an ancestry database,” Neo added with hopeful enthusiasm.
“I figured if I was doing it for Caroline and Samantha, why not Pualani? It takes time, but maybe we get a ping on a relative. If she’s got a cousin or uncle out there somewhere that is in the database, we’ll be able to narrow down who Kalea’s rapist is. ”
Kayl frowned. “Don’t those things take about two months to get back?”
Neo shrugged, clearly not any happier about that than Kayl. “Sometimes, but with so many unknowns, what could it hurt? And even if no relatives come back, we could at least narrow down this guy’s race.”
Two fucking months. This better not take that long. Then again, right now, I had nothing but time on my hands. “You said you had a list of men you thought I should look into in person?” I asked Neo.
They did something on their computer, and a second later, my phone pinged in my pocket. “It’s only about fifteen guys, including fellow high school students and boarders who had been at the Ka’ana’ana farm since the time you all were kids.”
I opened my phone and scrolled through the list. Kayl looked over my shoulder to examine it too. “Feel like going for a ride?” I asked him.
“Shoots!” he nodded with a wicked grin. “I’ve been itching to get my hands dirty all week. Your cut and my badge stay behind, though.”
I agreed. Besides, this wasn’t club business. This was personal. “Let’s go.”