The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  The reporter’s appointment was with me.

  “Excuse me.” I tried again to pull away from the grip Keyes had on my arm. “I need to go.”

  “I don’t bite,” the old man promised, his voice low enough for only me to hear. “No matter what your sister may have led you to believe.”

  This time, I ducked the old man’s grasp a little more firmly, trying not to draw attention to either of us. As I slipped into the crowd, a man in a suit approached me. It took a second for me to recognize him.

  Secret Service. Remembering Bodie’s advice, I searched my memory for a name. He’d been the one on the front porch the day the president had come to see Ivy.

  “Is everything all right here?” he asked me, eyeing Adam’s father.

  “Kostas, right?” I said. A slight change in the man’s expression told me that Bodie was right. It paid to learn names. “Everything’s fine.”

  I started walking toward the balcony. I needed to find Henry. He’d been gone for too long. There were too many people to keep track of. The president. Georgia. William Keyes. And who knew how many others.

  How many people here work in the West Wing? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to that question.

  I’d made it three steps when I ran smack into someone heading in the opposite direction with the same speed and force of purpose. Ivy. I registered her presence an instant before she registered mine. She’d reached out instinctively to steady me when we’d collided, but now her hand tightened around my arm.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her. She hadn’t been present for appetizers or dinner.

  “What am I doing here?” Ivy asked, her voice dangerously pleasant. “What am I doing here?” The second time, even the veneer of pleasantness began to slip from her tone. “What are you doing here?”

  I was grounded and this was a high-security, invitation-only affair. It was a fair question, but all I could think was that I’d lost track of Henry.

  “Tess.” Ivy shook me slightly.

  “I tried calling you.” I stepped toward her so that I could whisper without fear of anyone overhearing. She loosened her grip on my arm—slightly. “Henry Marquette knows. Everything I knew, he knows, and he went to the press. He told the reporter who wrote the Pierce article everything.”

  Ivy went pale as a sheet. An instant later, a mask of calm slid over her face, her lips held in a soft smile that sent a chill down my spine.

  “Henry’s been making noise about his grandfather’s death,” I reiterated, afraid to stop talking. “And then he came here.”

  Understanding shone in Ivy’s brown eyes. “He hoped someone was listening.”

  “I have to go.” I tried to push past Ivy.

  She brought her free hand up and grabbed my free arm. She held me out in front of her, one of her hands on each of my shoulders.

  “He went off by himself a few minutes ago. I should have gone with him, but Keyes stopped me.” I kept talking as I tried to pull out of her grasp. “I have to find Henry.”

  “No. I have to find Henry,” Ivy replied tightly. “You are going to go introduce yourself to the Icelandic ambassador and tell him you go to school with his daughter. Don’t leave his side. Don’t say anything to anyone. Do you understand?”

  Before I could say a word, she’d whisked me over to Di’s father, who vigorously shook my hand and seemed to have no intention of letting go. Ivy disappeared into the crowd, and I was left trying to extract myself from a very enthusiastic Icelander, who seemed intent on educating me about the relations between Iceland and Denmark.

  By the time I managed to shake him, Ivy was long gone.

  I started off in the direction I’d seen Henry go. The edges of the room were crowded. The farther I walked, the harder it became to make my way through the ball-gowned masses without giving in to the urge to throw some elbows.

  “Tess.” A light hand was laid on my shoulder. “Is everything all right?”

  Georgia. I tried to step back, but suddenly the hand on my shoulder wasn’t so light.

  “I understand from your sister that we have a situation,” Georgia said. She gave every appearance of someone chatting about the weather as she linked her arm through mine and turned me back toward the dance floor. “It’s important that we stay calm and trust the proper authorities to get to the bottom of this . . . unfortunate situation.”

  Authorities? What did she know? What had Ivy told her?

  “What situation?” I asked out loud.

  “The situation,” Georgia repeated. “With the reporter.”

  CHAPTER 52

  The reporter, I thought. The First Lady knows Henry and I talked to the reporter.

  Ivy was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t laid eyes on Henry in at least five minutes. When I scanned the room, I didn’t see the president, either.

  Stay calm. Think. I had to get out of here. I had to find my sister, or Henry, or both.

  The First Lady studied me with eyes every bit as knowing as Adam’s father’s.

  Just as she opened her mouth to say something, Ivy reappeared beside us. She said something to Georgia, too low for me to hear, then steered me out of the room.

  I tried to turn around and look at my sister, and found myself turned forcibly back to face forward. “Henry—”

  “Henry is fine,” Ivy said calmly. “At least, he will be until his mother finishes with him.”

  We passed two security teams on our way out of the White House. As we stepped out the East entrance, I tried again. “What happened back there?” I asked, my body dwarfed by massive columns that reminded me that this was the White House. The center of power for the entire country—by some definitions, the world. “Georgia knows about the reporter.”

  “She knows,” Ivy said sharply, “that the reporter is dead.”

  “Dead?” The word got caught in my throat. The man we’d talked to the day before—the one Henry had tipped off about his grandfather’s death—was dead?

  “The police found his body in an alleyway.” Ivy’s words were remarkably unemotional given the content of what she was saying. “Someone slit his throat.”

  Bodie pulled the car up. Before I could say anything, my sister had forcibly deposited me in the backseat and climbed into the front.

  “What’s she doing here?” Bodie asked Ivy, nodding toward me.

  “Tess and Henry Marquette decided a state dinner was a good place to play bait.” Ivy’s answer was laced with barely contained fury.

  My brain wouldn’t stop racing, couldn’t stop racing. Someone killed the reporter. Is the killer here? Does he know about us? My skin felt clammy all of a sudden. I felt my fingers digging into the seat beneath me.

  “Reagan National,” Ivy told Bodie. He turned and shot her a look I couldn’t quite read from the backseat, but she was already on the phone. “Adam,” she said. “I need a favor. Can you go by the house and pack a bag for Tess?”

  What?

  On the other end of the line, Adam must have asked a similar question, because Ivy responded.

  “Yes, I’m sure, Adam.” She paused, listening, and then spoke again. “Indefinitely.”

  “Indefinitely?” I overcame my inability to form coherent words. “What do you mean, indefinitely? Why is Adam packing me a bag?”

  Ivy didn’t answer. I turned my attention to Bodie.

  “What is Reagan National?”

  Bodie met my eyes briefly in the mirror. “Airport,” he answered.

  Airport. Bag.

  “I’m not going,” I said, feeling a ball of panic slowly unfurling inside me. “I’m not going anywhere. Ivy!”

  She wasn’t listening to me. As soon as she got off the phone with Adam, she placed another call. “Stetson,” she said, a smile in her voice that I knew, without being able to see her, was not reflected on her face. “Ivy Kendrick. I need a favor.”

  It soon became clear that when Ivy said I need a favor, what she really meant was I need a plane.

 
Less than an hour after she’d removed me from the White House, she was putting me on that plane. Standing on a private airstrip, being ordered onto a private plane, I didn’t have time to wonder when, exactly, I’d become a girl who wore ball gowns and had access to jets.

  “Ivy,” I said for probably the fortieth time. “What is going on?”

  This time, she answered. “What’s going on,” she said, her voice cutting through the wind around us like a red-hot knife through butter, “is that Carson Dweck was murdered this afternoon.”

  Less than twenty-four hours after talking to Henry and me.

  “What’s going on,” Ivy continued, “is that I have every reason to believe the person who killed him was there tonight.” Ivy’s gaze was focused entirely on me, with an intensity that scared me. “What’s going on is that I came to the White House to fill the president in on the situation, and I found you. What’s going on, Tess, is that you have drawn an enormous target on your own forehead, and I am getting you out of here.” She glanced back at her driver. “Bodie will go with you.”

  Bodie gave a brief nod in response.

  “You’re sending me away.” That wasn’t a question. I wasn’t sure why I’d said the words out loud. My chest was tight, each breath hard-won. “Ivy, I didn’t mean to—”

  Ivy took a step forward, closing what little space there was between us. “Right now, I don’t care what you meant to do, Tess. I asked you to do one thing. I asked you to keep your mouth shut.” Her lips trembled slightly, then pulled back to reveal her teeth. “I asked you to trust me.” She turned her head, like she couldn’t stand to look at me. “Maybe I should have known that was asking too much.”

  I felt like she’d knocked the breath out of me.

  “Ivy, I—”

  “Give me your phone.” She wasn’t going to listen to me. She’d shut down. She was shutting me out.

  I handed it to her. She popped the battery out, dropped the phone onto the tarmac, and crushed it underneath her heel.

  “Ivy.”

  Ivy stared at the crushed phone for a moment, then looked back up. “You won’t need this,” she said. She turned to Adam. “You have her bag?”

  Adam held it out to me. I stood with my hands to my side. If I didn’t take it, this wasn’t real.

  “You can go with your things,” Ivy told me calmly, “or you can go with nothing but the clothes on your back, but I swear to you, Tess, you are getting on that plane if I have to order a sedative and knock you unconscious.”

  Adam put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder. She took in a ragged breath. I looked over at Bodie, who was standing a few feet away.

  “Get on the plane, kid,” he said gently.

  “You can’t do this,” I said. I was talking to Bodie and to Ivy and to Adam, who hadn’t said a word since he’d gotten here.

  “I can,” Ivy said, “and I am.” For a second, I thought she’d leave it there, but she didn’t. “I’m the adult here. I make the decisions. You’re the kid.” She brought her hand gingerly to my cheek. “You’re my kid.”

  “Ivy.” That was all Adam said—just her name—but she responded like he’d said something else.

  “No, Adam. If she’s never going to trust me, if she’s set on hating me forever, she might as well hate me for the right reason.”

  I don’t hate—

  I couldn’t even finish the thought, because suddenly, Ivy was talking again, and it was very hard to breathe.

  “You’re my kid.” She repeated the words. “Mine, Tess.”

  I told myself that she meant that I was her responsibility now.

  “I’m not your sister.” Those words were harder to misunderstand. “I was never your sister.”

  I don’t understand.

  I don’t want to.

  “I was seventeen.” Ivy’s arms encircled her waist. “He was young, too, recently enlisted. It was the first, last, and only time I’d ever really let go. And then, when I found out . . .”

  Found out. Found out. Found out. The words echoed in my mind.

  “I was your age, Tess. I was a kid, so when Mom and Dad decided that the best thing would be for them to raise you, I said yes.” She repeated herself then. “I said yes.”

  I remember my parents’ funeral.

  I remember my sister carrying me up the stairs.

  I remember my head on Ivy’s chest.

  Except Ivy was saying that they weren’t my parents. They were her parents, and she wasn’t my sister.

  She was my mother.

  “I am going to keep you safe,” Ivy told me, her voice shaking. “I have to.”

  I stood there, staring at Ivy, a hundred thousand thoughts and memories and moments rushing through my head.

  And then I got on the plane.

  And then I shattered.

  CHAPTER 53

  For the longest time after the plane landed, I just sat there, staring straight ahead, feeling like a hitchhiker in someone else’s body. My limbs had grown unbearably heavy. I felt like I might never move again.

  I was seventeen, Ivy had said.

  I didn’t want to replay the words. I didn’t want to picture Ivy at my age. I didn’t want to think about the one year we’d lived in the same house, before she’d gone off to college and it had been just Mom and Dad and me.

  Not my mom. Not my dad.

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that they’d died, and it wasn’t fair that Ivy had taken the few memories that I had and twisted them until I didn’t recognize them anymore.

  My parents died when I was little. How many times had I said those words? But it wasn’t true—none of it was true. I wasn’t an orphan. I’d never been an orphan. The woman who’d given birth to me wasn’t dead. And my father?

  He was young, too, recently enlisted.

  Six words—and that was all I knew.

  My parents were never my parents, I thought, forcing my brain to actually form the words. And my grandfather . . . I thought of Gramps forgetting that I existed and mistakenly believing that I was Ivy and that Ivy was his daughter.

  Gramps knew, I realized suddenly. Of course he knew. He’d lied to me.

  They all did.

  I closed my eyes, memories flooding over me. I remember the funeral. I remember Ivy carrying me up the stairs. I remember sitting on the floor in front of Ivy while she brushed my hair. I remember Ivy kneeling down next to me. I remember patting her wet cheek.

  I remember Ivy crying, then giving me away.

  Having your entire life rewritten in a heartbeat was an impossible thing.

  “You can’t sit there forever, kid.” Bodie had given me my space, but now I felt him slide into the seat next to mine. I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes to look at him, because I didn’t want to see the way he was looking at me.

  Like he felt sorry for me.

  Like I was broken.

  The minutes ticked by before Bodie spoke again. “She saved that ranch of yours, you know.”

  She as in Ivy. My eyes stung under my eyelids. I swallowed, trying to shut out what he was saying.

  “She hired someone to look after things, checks in on it herself every day.” Bodie’s tone was casual, like he wasn’t effectively reaching into my chest and ripping out my heart with each word.

  Ivy had saved the ranch. Ivy, who was my—

  “Stop,” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth. I forced my eyes open. “Why would you tell me that now?”

  Bodie propped one leg up against the seat in front of him. “Got you to open your eyes, didn’t it?”

  I couldn’t argue that point. “Where are we?” I asked flatly.

  Bodie rested an arm on the back of my seat, but kept his gaze focused straight ahead. “Welcome to Boston.”

  Boston.

  My grandfather looked exactly as he always had. In the three weeks I’d been in DC, I’d tried calling him a half-dozen times. We’d spoken twice. He’d only recognized my voice once.

  But today was a good day
.

  “You’re looking like something the cat dragged in, Bear.” Gramps sat at a small table near the window. The suite was private—more condo than hospital room—but there was no kitchen, no stove, and the nurses were right down the hall. “Got a hug for an old man,” he said gruffly, “or were you raised in a barn?”

  It was an old joke, because, of course, I had been raised, at least in part, in a variety of barns. I managed a small smile and was blindsided with one emotion after another: longing and gratitude; loneliness, emptiness, hope I knew better than to let myself feel. Hurt and betrayal. Anger that he’d lied to me for so long. Fear that if I let myself be angry, I might somehow be wishing away one of his last good days.

  Swallowing down the lump rising in the back of my throat, I walked over to the window. I willed my arms to wrap themselves around him, but they were dead weight by my side.

  Gramps was here, and he was himself. I loved him. He was in me and part of me, he’d made me—but I couldn’t make my arms move.

  “How are they treating you?” I asked, my voice rough.

  “It’s not the Four Seasons,” Gramps replied. “But it’ll do.”

  “I tried,” I said, the words working their way out of the pit of my stomach. “I tried to keep you at home.” If I could focus on that—the older hurt—I didn’t have to deal with the new one.

  “You’re a fighter,” Gramps commented. “Always have been.”

  Always. Always. Always. He’d always been the one person I could count on.

  Always. Always. Always. He’d been lying to me from the beginning—snapping pictures of me and sending them to Ivy.

  Pictures she’d kept.

  I didn’t realize until I felt a sharp pain in my hand that I was digging my nails into my palm.

  “You look skinny.” Gramps pushed himself to stand—slowly, painstakingly. “Doesn’t your sister feed you?”

  I wrapped my arms around my middle, when all I wanted was to wrap them around him. “She’s not my sister.”

  He saved me the work of reaching out to him by pulling me forward and into his arms. His callused hand stroked the back of my head. “I know.”