Page 4 of Broken Hearts

I step back, my hand in my hair again as I start to pace the small space of the storeroom, my brain trying to process this piece of information. “What do you know about her?” I eventually ask.

Alana shrugs again. “Literally nothing,” she says. “Only that she lives in New York, and he hasn’t seen her in years.”

“But you called her?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

She takes a deep breath, letting it out slowly as she stands there watching me. “I thought she should know,” she finally says. “She is his daughter.”

“A daughter he hasn’t seen in years,” I spit out, suddenly angry that this person even exists, that she gets to have a bigger claim to Mitch than I do. “How’d you even get her number?” Alana’s eyes flick to the roof, and I know exactly what she’s going to say before she says it. “You went through his apartment?” I say, my tone harsh.

“I mean, I didn’t go through it,” she says defensively. “I just had a look to see if I could find her details. She deserves to know, Nate. She’s his daughter, and none of this is her fault.”

“Oh really, and why don’t they talk to each other then? Why hasn’t he seen her in years? Why the fuck didn’t he tell any of us about her?” I’m shouting now, my heart pounding in my chest as anger courses through me. I know this isn’t Alana’s fault, but she’s the one telling me, so I’m taking it out on her.

“I don’t know why they don’t talk, Nate,” Alana shouts back at me, clearly having had enough of my attitude. “He never told me any of those details. All he ever said to me was how much my eyes reminded him of his daughter’s and as soon as he’d said it, I could tell he regretted it. When I asked him about her, he tried to dismiss it, said she lived in New York, and he rarely saw her, and I was not to mention her again. To anyone.”

“Fucking hell,” I groan, blowing out a breath as I try to process all of this. It’s fucking hard enough having lost him, but to find out there are things about him that I had no clue about, that just feels like maybe I never really knew him at all.

“There’s more,” she says, her words low, like she’s afraid to tell me.

I roll my eyes as I meet her gaze. “What?”

“I invited her to come to the memorial,” she says, not looking away. “I sent her the details and told her when it was. She said she’d come.”

“Fuck,” is all I can say as I shove past her and walk out of the storeroom, not wanting to hear anymore.

In the end, we don’t open the shop, at least not from what I can tell from my spot out the back, but I don’t bother to get up to check or work my shift.

The Pipe Dream is an iconic shop on Maui, and Mitch has been running it for as long as I can remember. I don’t think it’s ever been closed a day in its life, and I’d hate to think what he’d think about it being closed today.

Still after everything Alana admitted to me, I just can’t bring myself to be there. Or be near her. I feel hurt and angry, betrayed by a man who I worshiped. So I do what any grown twenty-four-year-old guy does, and I sit out the back of the shop, in the grassed area that he always used for barbecues and random get-togethers, and I spend the day drinking beers from his fridge.

“You ready to talk to me again?” Alana says as she wanders outside and drops into the chair beside mine, plucking the Corona out of my hand and taking a sip. She doesn’t give it back to me, and to be honest, that’s probably for the best considering how many I’ve already drunk.

“I don’t know,” I say, stretching my legs out and propping them up on one of the makeshift tables out here. “You ready to tell me what else you know that I don’t?”

“Nate,” she says, her hand resting on my arm. “Don’t be like that. It was an accident when I found out, and like I said, I honestly thought you already knew. I wasn’t keeping it from you on purpose.”

“Yeah, but he was,” I spit out. “Why the fuck wouldn’t he tell me something like that? I thought…I thought we…”

I trail off, not wanting to admit that I thought he and I were closer than that. That we didn’t just work together and surf together, we shared a bond that was the closest thing I had to a father-type relationship. God knows my own dad wasn’t ever in the picture; neither of my parents really were, and Mitch knew that, knew all my fucking secrets.

But he’d kept one from me. A really fucking big one, and I have no idea why or what I’m supposed to do about that.

Alana squeezes my arm. “I’m sure he had his reasons,” she says quietly. “Mitch was…well, he was a complicated guy at times, you know that.”

I blow out a laugh as I slide down in my chair, looking up at the apartment that sits above his shop. The apartment he lived in, the front balcony giving him the perfect view of the day’s swell. He loved this place, and even though he’d had countless offers to buy him out over the years, he never once entertained the idea of selling.

I think he knew that most people wanted to buy it so they could flatten the building and put a hotel or some high-rise apartment complex on the land, and Mitch didn’t want that.

It’s part of the reason everyone loves him too, that he protected this space and this business that serves not just the islanders, but the tourists who flock here too. It’s a tight-knit community here, and Mitch was revered for how much he wanted to keep it that way. And while he knew the tourists were a big part of how we survive, he didn’t want this place to become commercialized like so much of Honolulu has.

“What if she wants to get rid of this place?” I eventually say, my words a whisper.

“We don’t even know if Mitch had a will,” Alana says, taking another sip of beer. “Maybe he made plans for it.”

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