But then again, maybe Eli could help. Daniella at least trusted him, and Daniella must have needed someone she trusted right now. At least, that’s how Rinn assumed Daniella felt. But Daniella had been harder to pin down than anyone Rinn had ever met before. Rinn turned, about to vacate the vault again, when her shoe squeaked against the floor and gave her presence away.

Eli looked up. “Oh, hey, what’s going on?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in the office?” Rinn’s voice came out sharper than she had intended.

“Yeah, but Danny kicked me out, so I’m up here hiding until she’s out of there. Is the coast clear? Can I go down now?” Eli asked the question so wide-eyed.

Rinn shook her head. If only he’d been there. If he’d been in the room, maybe Harvey wouldn’t have attacked. Maybe there would have been a way to have saved Daniella from him. But Eli had left the room, and Harvey had walked in, and Maya had left him alone, and Rinn hadn’t thought to go with him, and nothing could be avoided now. It wasn’t any of their faults. It was Harvey’s. The consequences were all that were left to be dealt with now.

Rinn came to a decision. “I need you to go check on Daniella.”

“Why?”

Rinn hesitated. This wasn’t Rinn’s story to tell. Rinn didn’t even know exactly what had happened. She’d seen only the aftermath of it all. The wild, wide-eyed hurt on Daniella’s face. The rage building in Brock Harvey’s. That he has so smoothly smothered it to appear genteel and proper. Rinn might have been naive, but she wasn’t stupid. There weren’t many reasons a girl risked her employment to stomp on a guy when she was left alone in a room with him, but none of them reflected well on the dude.

Rinn also wasn’t sure what that meant for her freshly slapped face, and she didn’t want to think too hard about that, either. “Look, I can’t really say. But I can say that she needs a friend and not to be alone right now. Don’t ask her too many questions. Just go be a friend to her.”

Eli stared for a moment. “I’m not sure that we’re friends.”

Rinn felt her rage boiling up inside of her. “What else would you be?”

Eli looked at her for a moment. “Not friends.”

Rinn stared back, unwilling to yield in this. “She needs a friend, Eli. Can you do that? Can you go and sit with her and make sure she’s not alone and not be a jerk about it? Or are you going to sit here and argue over the semantics of friendship before dealing with the fact that Daniella has an actual problem?”