Chapter 19: Her Lunch Money

Gill's POV

I opened the front door in Ronan's shirt with my hair in a knot.

Camille stood on the step, dripping onto the mat.

Her feet were cut from the walk up the hill.

She still held the cupcake box with both hands.

"I don't know where else to go," she said.

"Come in."

Ronan was waiting in the hall with a towel across his knees.

He handed it to her without a word.

She sat at the kitchen island with the towel around her shoulders, and I knelt and picked a pebble out of her heel.

She let me.

She didn't say anything until I had finished.

"Adele said it on camera," she said. "In front of everyone."

"I was there."

"Daddy had her taken back to the house. She's in the guest wing with a guard on the door."

I stopped with the pebble in my fingers.

"Is she hurt?"

"No. She keeps asking whether you ate."

It was such a mother thing to ask that I didn't know what to do with my face.

Ronan took the stool across from her and laid his hands on the counter.

"Why are you here, Camille?"

"Because Daddy gave me a speech." Her fingers crept to the lid of the box.

"It's for the gala. The Hollister Hotels fortieth anniversary, next Saturday, with six hundred guests and the cameras. It's four pages."

"What does it say?"

"That Gill is a sad, confused girl who was used by a man with a grudge."

She looked at Ronan and away.

"That he was driving drunk two years ago, and that I forgive him for the sake of the family."

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