9. Aria
I sat cross-legged on my couch, laptop balanced on my knees, spreadsheets open across three different tabs.
I stared at the number. Blinked. I checked it again.
Eight hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars. Our best year ever, by nearly two hundred thousand. Enough to fund the mobile clinic expansion, the new education programs, the scholarship initiative Evie had been so excited about.
I should have been thrilled. I should have been dancing around my living room, calling Nalani, popping champagne.
Instead, I was thinking about Sebastian Dubois.
No. I wasn't thinking about him. I was explicitly not thinking about him. I was not thinking about the way he'd smiled at me from across the room, while I stood on that stage wanting to murder him with my bare hands.
I was definitely not thinking about the end of the night, when he'd cornered me by the side door, close enough that I could smell his cologne while he told me he was looking forward to our date.
Our date.
I jabbed at my keyboard harder than necessary.
Who did he think he was? Not only had he cornered me at the gala and accused me of making atrocious statements about him, as if I'd been the one starting things, but then he'd had the absolute audacity to make the entire event about himself.
Bidding on me like I was some prize to be won.
Making a spectacle in front of three hundred of New York's most influential donors.
And for what? To prove he could? To watch me squirm?
Now I owed him an entire evening. A date with a man I couldn't stand for five minutes.
How fortunate for me.
"You're glaring at your laptop again."
I looked up. Priya stood in the doorway to my living room, a stack of folders tucked under one arm, two cups of coffee balanced in her hands.
She'd let herself in with the spare key I'd given her years ago, back when we'd first started the foundation and my apartment had doubled as our headquarters.
"The laptop is innocent," I said. "I'm glaring at the memory of a certain someone."
"Ah." She crossed the room and handed me one of the coffees. "The certain someone who donated a hundred thousand dollars to go on a date with you?"
"Don't remind me."
"It's kind of hard not to. It's all anyone's talking about.
" She settled onto the other end of the couch, tucking her feet under her.
"Social media is losing its mind. 'Billionaire Hotel Heir Bids Fortune for Hotel Heiress.
' 'Sebastian Dubois's Shocking Gala Move.
' My favorite headline called you 'the nonprofit queen who brought the ice king to his knees. '"
"I didn't bring him to anything. He did this to himself."
"Mmhmm." Priya sipped her coffee, watching me over the rim. "So. The disbursement plan."
Right. Work. I could focus on work.
We spent the next hour going through the folders she'd brought: allocation breakdowns, vendor contracts, timeline projections for the clinic expansion.
The numbers were good. Better than good.
If we stayed on track, we'd have three new mobile units operational by fall, reaching communities that had never had access to preventive care.
This was what mattered. This was the work that actually meant something.
Not Sebastian Dubois and his power plays.
Priya set down her empty coffee cup and stretched. "So," she said, a smile creeping across her face. "Are you excited?"
"About the clinic expansion? Obviously. The outreach potential alone…"
"About your date with Sebastian."
I nearly spit out my coffee. "Excited?" I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "Hell no. Absolutely not. Not even a little."
"But you're going, right?"
"Only because I have to." The words tasted bitter. "He paid for the date. The foundation accepted the money. If I back out now, it’s going to look like we don't honor our commitments." I shook my head. "I'm not going to enjoy it. Not even for a second."
Priya was giving me that look again. The one where someone's trying to be polite but you can practically hear them thinking ‘bullshit’ in their head. I watched her open her mouth, probably to call me out, and felt a weird mix of relief and dread when the front door swung open instead.
Mom.
Of course.
She swept into the living room like she always did—like a thunderstorm, like something you couldn't possibly prepare for even though you knew it was coming. "Darling!"
The caftan was new. Coral and gold, flowing around her like she'd just walked off some Mediterranean yacht.
Which, actually, she kind of had. Her hair was down, loose around her shoulders in a way that made her look younger than she had any right to, and her arms were already reaching for me before I'd even processed that she was here.
I managed to shove my laptop aside half a second before impact.
"Mom." The word came out muffled against her shoulder as she squeezed the air from my lungs. I gave her back a weak pat. "I can't breathe."
"I'm sorry, honey." She pulled back, but her hands stayed clamped on my shoulders while her eyes did that thing—that mom x-ray vision thing where they're somehow cataloging every bad decision you've made in the past week. "I just missed you terribly. You look tired. Are you sleeping?"
Here we go.
"I'm fine, Mom. The gala was just last night, so…"
"The gala! Yes!" She released me—finally—and dropped onto the couch, patting the cushion beside her like I was five years old.
I caught Priya gathering her folders in my peripheral vision, that amused smirk on her face that said: you're on your own. She slipped toward the door and I shot her a small wave that was absolutely a plea for help, which she completely ignored.
Traitor.
"Tell me everything," Mom said. "How did it go?"
I sank onto the couch beside her. "It went well. We raised almost eight hundred and fifty thousand."
"That's wonderful, sweetheart." Her whole face lit up, and I felt that little glow of accomplishment despite myself. "Now, let me tell you about the cruise. Your father and I had the most marvelous time."
And she was off.
For the next twenty minutes, I half-listened while she painted these elaborate word pictures—the Mediterranean coastline at sunset, wine-dark water catching pinks and golds from the sky.
These tiny restaurants tucked into coastal villages where apparently everyone knew each other's names and the house vintage came from vineyards that were practically in the backyard.
The night they danced on the deck under the stars, just the two of them.
It sounded nice. It sounded really nice, actually, in that way that made my chest feel a little tight.
"This is why you need to find someone," she said, squeezing my hand. Her rings pressed into my fingers. "So you can experience things like this. Travel, adventure, romance. You can't work all the time, Aria."
And there it was.
"I experience plenty, Mom."
"Running a charity is not the same as living.
" She sighed—that particular sigh that said she knew I wasn't listening but was going to try anyway.
But then something shifted in her expression.
Her face got serious in a way that made my stomach drop.
"But I didn't come here just to lecture you. I have news. Business news."
I sat up straighter. Mom didn't do business talk. That was Dad's territory, always had been.
"There's a hotel in Maui," she said. "The owner is looking to sell."
"Which hotel?"
"The Kahale Grande."
Everything stopped.
The Kahale Grande.
I knew that hotel the way I knew my own heartbeat.
Better, maybe. Grandpa had started there when he was nineteen, as a bellhop.
He'd worked his way up from the bottom, learning every corner of that place, every secret, every story.
When I was little, he used to tell me about it—the guests he'd met, the storms that had nearly blown the roof off, the way the ocean looked from the top floor at dawn when the world was still quiet.
Dad had grown up in its shadow. He'd spent his whole childhood watching Grandpa, learning, dreaming about what a hotel could be. When he finally left Hawaii for New York, the Kahale Grande had come with him—burned into his memory like a blueprint for everything he wanted to build.
And when my parents got married, they'd gone back.
A small ceremony, just family and close friends, with the Pacific stretching out behind them like it went on forever.
I'd seen those photographs so many times I could close my eyes and be there—Mom in white, Dad looking impossibly young, both of them glowing with a happiness that seemed almost fictional now.
That hotel wasn't just a hotel. It was where my family began. Where everything began.
I managed to swallow the lump in my throat. "It's for sale? Why?"
"Lono Kahale is getting older." Mom's expression went soft, sympathetic in that way that made my chest hurt. "He has no children, no one to pass it to. It's been in his family for generations, but..." She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. "Time catches up with everyone."
My stomach twisted. "Who's the buyer?"
"That's the thing—no one knows. Lono is being very secretive. Very selective. He doesn't want to sell to just anyone." She paused, and I could see something flicker in her eyes. Understanding, maybe. Grief. "The hotel means too much to him."
God, I got that. I really got that.
The Kahale Grande wasn't just some building—it was a landmark. A piece of Hawaiian history that had somehow survived everything—hurricanes, recessions, the relentless steamroller of corporate tourism turning everything into the same beige luxury experience.
It was one of the last family-owned boutique properties on the island. The kind of place where the staff actually knew guests' names, where the culture wasn't just decorative, it was woven into everything.
If it fell into the wrong hands, if some faceless corporation got hold of it and gutted its soul, turned it into another generic resort with the same marble lobby and the same forgettable restaurants—