Page 117 of Red Hot Harmony

“Yep. Little rascal is good and can’t wait for you to get home.”

I exhaled in relief, then after chatting for a couple more minutes, we said our goodbyes.

I slipped my phone into the back pocket of my jeans that Cassy had washed and dried and promptly returned to me after breakfast.

Behind me, the door slid open and light footsteps approached.

I spun around, my gaze locking with Camille’s.

She’d changed into her own clean clothes too.

“We were just watching the news.” She motioned in the general direction of the living room. “The freeway won’t reopen today. The fire’s too close to Getty now.”

I didn’t really care about museums, but I still shivered at the thought that one of the brightest L.A. landmarks was under real threat.

My own battles seemed insignificant compared to what was going on around us right now. People’s livelihoods burned and I was drowning in self-pity.

Pathetic.

“How did it go with Ally?” I asked.

Camille moved closer and leaned against the railing next to me. “She understands that what happened was assault, but she’s refusing to act on it. She doesn’t want to”—Camille air-quoted with both hands—“get him involved. And she’s very insistent.”

“How old is he? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

“Something like that.”

“It’ll fuck him up. He could easily get charged with a felony.”

She turned to look at me, the red wisps of hair slipping across her cheek like stray rays of light. “Well, he should have thought about that before he tried to rape my daughter while she was barely conscious.”

There was so much suppressed anger in those words that I felt them punch into me, hot and solid and unrelenting. A true manifestation of everything this woman was. “What do you want to do?”

“I want him to take responsibility for what he did. He’s an adult, who should know better.” Camille visibly shook.

“And what does Ally want?”

“Ally wants to put it behind her. She’s convinced that this would be bad for her career. She said she doesn’t want to be the poster girl for some anti-sexual violence organization, because it was her fault too.”

I took a step forward, my hand moving with uncertainty in the empty space between us because I wasn’t sure if she should be touched. “Do you want me to talk to her?”

Camille shifted again and trained her eyes on the horizon. “Honestly, I don’t know what to do anymore,” she said sometime later, so quietly that the sentence could hardly be heard over the noise of the ocean. “If I choose to press charges, it’ll ruin whatever relationship I have with her, but if I choose to sweep it under the rug, who’s to say he won’t try it again with some other girl?”

After a moment of hesitation, I reached out and took her hand. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” she asked as I drew her back into the house and toward the corridor.

Surprisingly, there was very little opposition.

Once we were outside the room she and her daughter currently occupied, I knocked.

“Yeah?”

I pushed the door open and nudged Camille forward.

Ally was on the bed, watching TV. She sat up and paused whatever movie was playing when she saw us coming in.

Awkward silence descended.

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