I smiled. “You too.”
“So we’re both still awake,” she concluded.
“It looks like it, Troublemaker.”
“Nope.”
“Shame,” I said, as determined as ever to find the perfect nickname for her. I leaned back against my pillow. “How was your day?”
“Good.” Kate’s reply came a little too fast, but it wasn’t this that told me she was lying; it was the silence that followed. If there was one thing I knew about Kate, it was that she enjoyed talking—and that even more than talking, she liked to listen. Talking to her was always effortless. Normally she would have asked about my day now to keep the conversation going, but she didn’t. Her silence spoke volumes.
“Kate?”
“Yes?”
“What happened with Mr. Fleming?” I asked, because the topic was unavoidable.
For what felt like an eternity, the only sound in the room was the rustling of my duvet and the drumming of the rain against thewindowpane. Finally, a single word crackled through my phone’s speaker: “Nothing.”
“So Mr. Fleming complained to Giulia about nothing?”
Fear flickered across Kate’s face. “Am I fired?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what happened,” I said, which was a lie. Nothing Kate could say would make me fire her, risking her giving up a warm bed at The Darlington. I just wanted to know what had happened with Mr. Fleming. Whatever it was, it was apparently preoccupying Kate enough to keep her awake until 2 a.m.
“I’m sure Mr. Fleming has already explained.”
“I want to hear your version.”
Kate’s face lit up as a flash illuminated the sky, and I could see the doubt and uncertainty in her eyes. Her lips were pressed firmly together, as if she didn’t want to talk about it. But then she did. “He harassed me.”
“He what?” I gasped, even though I’d heard her clearly.
“He harassed me,” she repeated, but that only made it worse. I clenched my hands into fists.
“Tell me about it,” I demanded.
She avoided my gaze and turned onto her side, so that half her face was buried in her pillow. I guessed she would have liked nothing more than to disappear entirely into the mountain of down feather bedding.
“Giulia asked me to clean Mr. Fleming’s room, because he’d complained. At first he just watched me, but then he started asking me personal questions.” She spoke so quietly that I had to turn up the volume on my phone to catch her next words. “I kept my answers short because I didn’t want to talk to him, but he didn’tcare. He kept talking, and he told me how pretty I was.” I thought I detected a glimmer of tears in her eyes, but it was hard to be sure—her camera shook as if her hands were trembling. “I reminded him that a table had been reserved for him in the restaurant as compensation for his room not being clean, but he wanted me to apologisepersonally. When I said no, he grabbed my chin and told me that I’d like it, and that it was how things were done at The Darlington.”
My heart was racing, pumping pure rage through my veins. The bastard hadn’t just assaulted Kate—he’d also used my dad’s misconduct as justification. And then he’d had the audacity to file a complaint against Kate! Was he out of his mind?
“I made it clear that I didn’t want that, and that he should let me go, but he didn’t,” Kate went on. Her voice was shaky, cracking as though something inside her had broken. She was showing me the shards she’d swept under the rug to hide them from the world. “He undid his trousers and tried to force me onto my knees so that I would... you know. But I managed to get away just in time.”
I wanted to storm over to Mr. Fleming’s room and wring his neck with my bare hands, despite the fact that I didn’t usually resort to violence. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Henry...”
“Or better yet: I’ll tell his wife and let her kill him.”
“Leave it,” Kate begged.
My jaw clenched. “He wanted to rape you!”
