Page 7 of Red Hot Harmony

“Is Ally not home yet?” Jules asked.

A stupid, obvious question.

“No.” I pressed my index finger to my forehead, right above my nose, wishing for the pounding in my head to disappear so I could think.

Outside, an engine rumbled, a car pulling up into a driveway—my driveway! I darted toward the front door and caught a shimmer of bright red through the side window, laughter, a door slamming, then Ally’s silhouette moving in the direction of the porch.

My emotions were a knot of many.

I quickly dismissed Jules and hung up.

“You can’t do this ever again,” I said as soon as my daughter stepped foot inside the house.

“Okay,” she came back, her obvious lack of guilt deeply concerning.

“Ally!” I willed my voice into something hard, something that didn’t accept this conversation for what my daughter hoped it would be.

“What?” She halted halfway to her room and slowly spun to face me, her stare matching mine.

“Where were you?”

“Out.”

“You lied to me and you broke your curfew. You know you need to be home by nine on a school night, yet you ignored the rules.”

“It’s not like I’m gone every night.”

“You better not be.” All calmness left me. I knew this Ally wasn’t my Ally. This was Greg, with his cold, calculating blood, unwilling to compromise.

“Anything else?” She rolled her eyes, which only pissed me off more.

“Yes.” I realized I was still grasping my phone. It had heated and felt ready to melt any second. “I know you don’t understand why I’m doing what I’m doing right now, but it’s for your own good, Ally. You can’t have everything. You can’t be a kid one minute and have your parent take care of you and the next, be an adult and do things that have catastrophic consequences whenever you feel like it. You can’t do this while still living under my roof. Fifteen years from now, you’ll be looking back at this time of your life and wishing you could be a kid a little longer. You’ll be wishing for the simplicity of this. You’ll be wishing to not have responsibilities.”

There was something in Ally’s expression that indicated she understood exactly what I was trying to say, but it flickered and disappeared, and then her mask of indifference was back, and at that moment, I knew she’d chosen not to think about my words, she’d chosen not to think about what they meant.

“Are you done?”

“Don’t talk to me like that, Ally.”

“How do you want me to talk to you when you don’t talk to me? All you do is stall.”

Realization blossomed. On Sunday, I’d promised to have a discussion with her and that had never happened.

She turned and marched into her room, the door slamming a little too loud.

Ungrateful brat. You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed for you.

The words were there on the tip of my tongue, ready to be unleashed, but I didn’t... I simply couldn’t do that to my daughter. I couldn’t be my mother.

So I let her go quietly. Without a fight.

2 Dante

“Next week?” I spat in the direction of the phone that set on my nightstand next to my Rolex.

“It’s a good cause, good crowd, good PR, Dante,” my publicist, Eden, said, her voice rattling through my bedroom, foreign and distant.

There was a hum of traffic in the background that bled through her words, and I imagined she was probably driving somewhere in the city, somewhere busy.

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