Knowing that Kai was probably just as jet-lagged as her, since he’d finally adjusted to her time zone, she looked past him to her uncle. Nate had his head down; he was obviously waiting to talk to his son in private. Switching her attention back to Kai, Jessie held him close. “I’m here when you need me.” He smiled and nodded, then gave her a goodnight kiss.
Hoping the conversation between the two men went well, Jessie shuffled off to Kai’s childhood room to get ready for bed. After changing and brushing her teeth, she climbed onto his small mattress and looked at all the signs of young Kai’s life around the room. While it wasn’t a child’s room anymore, there was plenty of evidence that it had been once—old stickers on the dressers, army men shoved in a gap between the window frame, a poster of a bikini clad girl on the wall. Smiling at the image of Kai as a boy, Jessie closed her eyes and let the exhaustion flow through her. As she started fading into sleep, she heard low voices coming through the wall. Realizing that Kai and his dad must be right outside the bedroom window, Jessie fought through the fatigue to listen to their conversation.
Kai’s voice broke through the stillness of the night. “Dad, why didn’t you just tell me? I mean, I can understand not wanting to let me know when I was young…but I haven’t been young for a while now.” He paused for a second and Jessie shifted to face the direction of the open window. “Why keep me in the dark? Why send me to Mason?”
Uncle Nate let out a long, beleaguered sigh. “I tried to tell you, Kai. You have no idea how many times I stared at you and tried to tell you.” He sighed again and paused long seconds before continuing. “But every time, the anger, the betrayal…it all resurfaced, and I…I just couldn’t make the words come out.”
Feeling sympathy for her uncle sweep over her, Jessie sat up. None of this could have been easy on him, and he’d been dealing with it for so long. He must have been a wreck. He must have been desperate for it to end, and at the same time, terrified. Nate continued in a soft voice, and Jessie pressed her head to the wall to hear him better. “After years of that, of not being able to talk to you like I wanted to talk to you…it ate at me. I needed you to know, but I still couldn’t tell you.”
He paused again, and Jessie tried to picture having a conversation like this with her own father. She couldn’t. “I figured, since I physically couldn’t get the words out around you, and Leilani absolutely refused to tell you…maybe he…maybe Mason could finally do something right…and maybe he could tell you.” Her uncle sighed heavily again. “Once I had that thought, it consumed me, and then I needed him to be the one to tell you. In my mind, there were no other options.”
Jessie looked down at the black and white sheets of Kai’s bed, torn for the both of them. For all of them really. Kai exhaled, not speaking for long moments. “I wish you had somehow found a way to tell me, Dad. It hurt so much to have a stranger do it.” Jessie closed her eyes, remembering how she’d found Kai. She’d never seen someone so shaken up.
Her uncle didn’t respond to that right away. “I’m so sorry, son. I was wrong. I promise you I will never deceive you like that again.” Jessie smiled as she settled against Kai’s pillows. Maybe they would all come out of this stronger. As she closed her eyes, Uncle Nate spoke again. “I’m so…I’m so grateful you still call me Dad.” There was so much relief in his voice; it made Jessie smile.
Kai laughed a little, and the sound lightened the heavy mood Jessie could feel pouring in from the outside. “Of course I’ll still call you Dad. It’s who you are, blood or not.”
Jessie heard the men shuffling, and imagined they were hugging. “I love you, Kai.”
“I love you too, Dad.” Jessie started falling asleep with a smile on her face and tears on her cheeks, happy that even though the blood bond had been broken between them, the bond of love hadn’t been.
After that candid conversation, things between Kai and his father were less tense. Their relationship evened out, once the sting of deception and lack of communication started dulling. They often sat on the lanai after dinner, talking late into the night while Jessie crawled into Kai’s childhood bed. Before she fell asleep at night, she’d be comforted by the sounds of their reconnection. Through the walls she would listen to her uncle repeat his guilt and grief at not having had the strength to tell Kai himself. And for his part, Kai was pretty sympathetic to the man’s feelings. When Jessie asked him about it, Kai told her that it wasn’t his dad’s fault that he hadn’t been the one to create him, and he couldn’t imagine having to tell a child something that hard.