Pualena Dawn (The Aloha Sisters #1)

Chapter 1

Anne

It was a tranquil morning in Hawaii, all birdsong and golden sunlight.

Anne stepped out into the fresh air and lifted her face to the gentle sunlight that slanted down over the mauna. The sky shone a pristine shade of summer blue, and the tropical breeze was soft on her skin.

Her heart felt a bit lighter than it had the night before. Shepherding two tired children through the airport, returning to the Big Island for the first time since her father’s memorial service, life had felt impossibly heavy.

Now it felt… not light, exactly, but manageable. The weight of everything she had to bear hadn’t changed, but today she actually felt up to the task of carrying it.

“Beat you to the pool!” Pete raced down the sidewalk, and the slap of his bare feet on the pavement echoed through the quiet morning.

“In your dreams!” Claire sprinted past, red hair streaming behind her. Five years older and a foot taller than her little brother, she overtook him before he reached the gate.

Twin splashes sounded up ahead as her kids cannonballed into the pool. By the time she walked through the gate, they were already at the top of the slide.

The resort pool was huge, a manufactured paradise with waterslides and artificial waterfalls. Plants both plastic and planted broke up the concrete landscape with splashes of pink and green.

Anne walked to a front-row lounge chair, where the sharp tang of chlorine overtook the sweet scent of plumeria flowers.

This concrete landscape with its iron fences and plastic furniture was so different from her Pualena childhood that it might as well be a different world…

in reality, it was just another side of the island that had raised her.

The sun was still low enough in the sky to be warm and gentle, and Anne let it warm her back. In another hour, the Kona sunshine would be ruthless. Her freckled skin wasn’t well equipped for the Islands, but she’d been born to them all the same.

“Mom, watch this!” Pete rushed down the slide headfirst and did a faceplant into the pool. He came up spluttering and smiling.

Claire laughed, and the childlike sound warmed Anne’s heart. It was good to see her fourteen year old acting like a kid for once, clowning around with her little brother instead of trying to impress her classmates in California.

That chapter was behind them now. One silver lining in all of this mess was that it would get her daughter away from the toxic friendships that she had formed back on the mainland.

Of course, Claire wouldn’t see it that way…

Pete crashed into the lounge chair next to her and shook himself like a dog, water flying from his dark blond hair.

“Mom, can I have a soda?”

“Are you thirsty? I brought water.”

He sighed and accepted the bottle that she pulled out of her bag.

“Could we get some cheesy fries?” he asked.

“Are you hungry already?”

“They smell really good.” Undisguised longing shone in his sky-blue eyes as he gazed at the array of junk food on a plastic table a few meters away where a family of tourists was sitting down to breakfast.

“No resort food.” Claire flopped onto the lounge chair beside him and held her hand out for the water bottle. “We’re broke, remember?”

Anne flinched, but the kids didn’t seem to notice.

Claire wasn’t wrong.

They were staying at the resort for free, a single night purchased with the last of her credit card points.

Those crumbs of her old life had purchased three one-way tickets to Kona and a short stay at the resort so that they could make their way to the other side of the island around midday instead of asking someone to drive those twisting mountain roads in the dark.

It was also one last treat for her kids… before she broke the news that this Hawaiian vacation had no end date in sight.

Anne was crawling home to her mother with her tail between her legs.

That was bad enough, at her age, but what really gnawed at her was the fact that she still had to find a way to explain it all to her children. Not only was she uprooting them, but she had done it without even telling them first. She worried that Claire would never forgive her.

In her experience, daughters rarely forgave their mothers anything.

“We have food back in the room if you’re hungry,” she told the kids.

“Pete’s always hungry.” Claire pushed her brother’s arm playfully and dove back into the pool. He jumped in after her, splashing into the water with a wave that swamped her right as she came up for air.

Anne smiled at their antics, but anxiety churned deep in her chest as she watched her kids play.

She had shielded both of them from the full truth of what was happening, and she worried that at some point over the past few months, her well-intentioned protection had crossed a line into the unforgivable.

She was hiding things from them that they had every right to know…

a new reality that would upend their entire lives.

They knew that their parents had separated. That was true of plenty of families in their circle, and their father had spent so little time at home in recent years that this extended absence was a minor change.

What they didn’t know was that their father had completely washed his hands of them.

He’d signed away his custodial rights and walked away without a backwards glance.

Leaving Anne for another woman was one thing, but abandoning his children was a move so cold that she still couldn’t wrap her mind around it, much less figure out how to explain it to the kids.

He’d left them with nothing.

The boutique hotel that Anne had devoted twenty years of her life to was gone, sold to pay his debts.

Their debts, technically, since they’d been incurred before the divorce.

Their family home was on the market too, but they owed so much on it that they would be lucky to break even once the realtors took their share.

The life she’d built in California was now a dumpster fire of debt and divorce.

Anne shoved her despair to one side and focused on the day ahead of her. The sun climbed higher in the sky, gathering strength with each fraction of a degree that it gained. Soon it would be blinding.

“Claire!” She waved her daughter over. “Come put some more sunscreen on.”

The teen rolled her eyes, but she swam over and climbed out of the pool.

“What about Pete?” she asked.

“Your brother tans,” Anne told her. “You don’t.”

Claire sighed dramatically and wrapped a towel around her hair, then used a second towel to scrub the water from her skin.

“Turn around,” Anne said. “I’ll get your back.”

She had tried to convince her daughter to wear a longsleeve swimsuit – best practice for freckle-faced girls in the harsh Kona sunshine – but Claire had refused.

So now Anne worked carefully, coating every inch of Claire’s back and shoulders with the thick white cream…

and all the while wondering what she had been thinking, dragging her redheaded daughter to the tropics.

But they didn’t have family anywhere else.

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“When are we going home?”

Unease prickled beneath Anne’s skin.

“We just got here,” she stalled.

“Yeah, I know. But when’s our return flight?”

“I haven’t booked it yet,” Anne admitted.

Claire gave her a worried glance over her shoulder.

“Most kids would be stoked about a trip to Hawaii,” she said with all the brightness that she could summon up.

“I’m stoked!” Pete yelled from midair. He crashed into the pool, spraying their feet with water.

“I have a life back home,” Claire said.

Anne bit her tongue. That life – catty rich girls and a seventeen-year-old boyfriend – wasn’t what she wanted for her daughter. But she knew better than to comment. If she said something that was even vaguely critical of her choices, it only made Claire double down.

“When are we going back?” she asked again.

“I’m still figuring that out.”

“Before school starts, right?” Claire turned around to look at her.

She met her daughter’s silver-gray eyes. They were narrowed now, obscured by dark red lashes. Countless freckles dotted her nose and cheeks. Sometimes Anne got lost in her daughter’s face. The resemblance was almost spooky – like looking at a younger version of herself.

“I don’t know,” she said at last.

“What?” Claire looked stricken. “Are we moving here?”

“Maybe. For a while.”

“You said you would find us a new house in La Jolla. You promised!”

“I’ve been trying, Claire. I’ve been looking everywhere. I can’t find anything.”

“And you’re telling me now?”

Anne closed her eyes for a heartbeat, holding back the tears that threatened to fall.

She opened them and steadied her voice through sheer force of will as she said, “I’ve applied for a hundred different jobs.

I’ve been searching for rentals. I’m still looking, and I’ll keep trying, but there’s nothing available in your school district that’s even remotely in the realm of what I can afford right now. ”

Claire stared at her, mouth open slightly in speechless shock. She looked so young and vulnerable in that moment that Anne’s heart nearly broke.

She reached for her daughter’s hand, but Claire snatched it away. Her expression hardened. She stood, turned, and dove into the pool.

Anne sighed and leaned into the shade of the umbrella.

She let the kids play until the last possible minute, and then they rushed back to their room to shower and change before checkout time.

When they walked back out, squinting in the bright midday sunshine and dragging the luggage that contained all of their worldly possessions, Anne’s little sister was there waiting.

Laurie looked tired, but her eyes brightened when she saw them.

Tears stung Anne’s eyes again – but this time, the overflow of emotion was from the gratitude that flooded her the moment she saw Laurie. Her gorgeous sister, with a smile that lit up her whole face.

Sometimes Anne didn’t realize just how much she’d missed her family until she saw them again.