The Fixer

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

  William Keyes had barely interacted with me, but I’d watched him. I’d heard him talking. I knew, instinctively, how to go straight for his heart.

  “You have a plan for Adam,” I said, “and I doubt that I am part of that plan.”

  “Are you attempting to blackmail me?” Keyes said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he sounded pleased.

  “I prefer to think of it as a negotiation,” I said. “You want to see your son in the Oval Office someday, and I want the governor of Arizona to issue either a pardon or a permanent stay of execution for Damien Kostas’s son.”

  Now that the cards were on the table, I saw how easily this could go either way. William Keyes might not give me what I wanted. Adam might not even be my father.

  I needed this to work.

  Ivy needed for this to work.

  “When were you born?” Keyes issued the question like a demand. Those four words—and the laser-sharp focus with which he assessed my features—told me that he wasn’t dismissing my claims outright.

  I can do this. I have to do this.

  I told him when I was born, and then where. I told him, again, what Ivy had told me: my father was young and recently enlisted.

  “Adam joined the military after college.” William’s grip on the back of the chair relaxed slightly. “He met your sister when he was home on leave. She’d just turned twenty.”

  I felt like a balloon that had been scratched with a knife. There was one moment of tightness in my chest, like I might explode, and then I felt the fight drain out of me. This was supposed to be my Hail Mary pass.

  This was supposed to be me saving Ivy.

  Adam met Ivy after I was born. As I forced myself to process that fact, I realized that I hadn’t just thought Adam was my father, I hadn’t just believed it—I’d wanted it to be true.

  If Keyes was telling me the truth, Adam couldn’t be my father. I wasn’t anything to him but Ivy’s daughter.

  I stood up and turned sharply to the door.

  “I suggest you sit back down.”

  I stopped in my tracks but didn’t sit.

  “Tess, isn’t it?” the older man said, coming around to stand in front of me. “Is that short for Tessa?”

  I wondered what game he was playing.

  “Theresa,” I said finally.

  Keyes studied me, eyes sharp. “My late wife’s name was Theresa.”

  The game had changed—but I wasn’t sure how.

  “I never quite figured out how Adam and Ivy met,” William Keyes continued. “She was at Georgetown. He went to see her. I’ve wondered, over the years, if there was something romantic between them.” He paused. “I see now that there’s not. That there couldn’t be.”

  He walked over to a shelf on the opposite side of the room and returned with a picture. In it were two young boys. The older one had a serious expression on his face. Adam. The younger boy—he had dark hair, a shade too light to be black. He was laughing, smiling.

  His eyes were hazel, a familiar mix of brown and green.

  “You look like him,” William Keyes said. I had no idea what he was feeling. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the picture—away from the boy.

  “Adam said he had a brother,” I said slowly. The memory washed over me. “The first time we met, Adam said he had a brother.”

  He’d said that his brother had never cared for school, that he had preferred to spend his time outside.

  Like me.

  “You know what I think, Tess?” Keyes said, putting the picture down. “I think that my youngest met Ivy during basic training. I think they were young and stupid and, if we want to be generous, maybe even in love. Tommy was like that. If he fell, he fell hard.”

  Was, I thought dully. Tommy was like that. The past tense hit me with an almost physical force.

  “I told him not to enlist. I told him to go to college. He could have been an officer—but he didn’t listen.” Keyes ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Adam thinks I pushed Tommy away, pushed him into joining up by forbidding him to go. Tommy died. I lost both sons.” The kingmaker’s sentences got shorter and curter. “And then there was Ivy.”

  Adam’s father—Tommy’s father—began to pace. I watched him, hyperaware in that moment that it was almost like watching myself. I’d looked at Adam, wondering if there was any of him in me, and now I knew.

  It wasn’t Adam.

  It was never Adam.

  “Adam must have known Tommy was seeing someone,” Keyes continued, his voice raising a decibel or two as he paced. “And somehow, he found out about you.”

  Me. The pieces fell into place in my mind. All of those times I’d felt like Adam was looking at me like I reminded him of someone—I’d assumed I reminded him of Ivy.

  But what if I was wrong?

  What if, when he yelled at me, when he told me that family didn’t bolt just because things were hard—what if those had been the times when I’d reminded him of his brother?

  His dead brother. I’d lost so much in the past few weeks: Gramps, my home, my identity, who I thought my parents were, Ivy. I’d read a poem once in English class, about what it meant to master the art of losing.

  I was an artist.

  And now—now I would never know my father. I would never get to meet him, never know if he would have looked at me and seen pieces of himself, if he would have wanted me.

  If I could have been a daughter he would have loved.

  I couldn’t stay here. I started for the door with no plans of what I would do when I walked out. I’d gambled and I’d failed, and now I really was going to be an orphan. Tommy was dead, and Ivy—

  Kostas is going to kill her.

  I tried.

  “Hold it right there, young lady.” Keyes barked out as my hand closed around the doorknob.

  “Why?” I asked, whirling around, caught between sorrow and a smoldering anger I wasn’t sure would ever go away. “If it was Adam, I had something to offer. But my father is dead. Dead men don’t win elections.”

  Dead men fathering illegitimate children was barely even news.

  My father is dead. It hurt. All I’d ever seen of him was a picture, and it hurt. Ivy might die. I hadn’t saved her.

  Just this once, I wanted to save someone.

  “No matter what Ivy and my son might have told you”—Keyes crossed the room to stand in front of me—“I’m not so heartless as to send my only grandchild away.”

  His grandchild. There was something in the way he said that word that was almost manic, as if my importance were larger than life.

  My heart clenched.

  “You’ll do it?” I asked, terrified to hope for even a second that the answer might be yes. “You’ll get the pardon?”

  You’ll save Ivy?

  William Keyes—my paternal grandfather—put a hand under my chin. He tilted my face toward his. “That depends,” he said, “on whether or not you’ll do something for me.”

  CHAPTER 63

  Back at Vivvie’s place, I told the others about the deal I’d struck, and I waited. Eventually, Asher got a text from his sister. Without a word, he flipped on the news.

  On the television, a pretty Asian American reporter stared directly into the camera, her hair whipping in the wind. “Again, I am standing outside the Washington Monument, where a SWAT team is closing in on what we are told is a hostage situation.” The camera panned to show a blockade—and beyond that, two dozen men, armed to the teeth.

  “Ivy,” I whispered. She had to be okay. She had to be. You have to get through this, I thought fiercely. You have to, Ivy. I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.

  I couldn’t look away from the screen, the armed men.

  Henry sat down beside me. “I would venture to guess that Kostas decided to make it harder for the president to ignore his demands,” he said.

  Ivy had promised Kostas that she would tell him exactly how to handle this situation. I wondered if she’d been the one to sugg
est taking the situation public.

  I will hate you forever if you leave me now, Ivy, I thought, wishing she could hear me. My eyes were dry. So was my throat. I had nothing left but the words repeating themselves over and over again in my head. I’d done everything right. I’d fixed this. Help was coming.

  She didn’t get to leave me again.

  On-screen, the reporter kept throwing information at us. The Washington Monument had been closed for construction. No one was sure how many people were inside, but there was a bomb.

  The bomb strapped to Ivy’s chest.

  I looked at the clock on the wall, like it could tell me when the deal I’d struck with Keyes would come through. Even for a man known for making things happen, conjuring a governor’s pardon out of nowhere took time.

  Time Ivy might not have.

  “We don’t have to watch.” Vivvie reached for the remote. I pulled it back.

  “Yes,” I said simply, “we do.”

  The four of us sat, one next to the other, our eyes locked on the screen. Vivvie’s hand worked its way into mine. On my other side, Henry surprised me by doing the same.

  I held on—like a person dangling from the edge of a skyscraper, like a drowning man reaching for a hand to pull him to shore.

  The press couldn’t get close. The Capitol loomed in the background. The SWAT team, the FBI . . . I didn’t know who else was there, trying to talk Ivy’s captor into releasing her, into not setting off the bomb.

  If it had been just her, if it hadn’t been public, would they have just let her die? Would they have swept it under the rug, covered it up? It hurt to ask myself the question. It hurt even more to know that the answer was almost certainly yes.

  “John!” the woman on the screen addressed the station’s news anchor excitedly. “Something is happening. Something is definitely happening.”

  Far away, behind the blockade, there was movement. Guns were raised. A door was opening. I couldn’t make out the features on anyone’s face.

  My phone buzzed, alerting me to arrival of a new text. It’s done. WK. William Keyes.

  I stopped breathing. I stopped blinking. I stopped thinking. I stopped hoping.

  All I could do was sit there as the reporter continued yelling at the camera, telling us that someone was coming out.

  “We have confirmation that the hostage is female,” the reporter was saying. “I’m hearing unconfirmed reports that there’s a bomb strapped to her chest.”

  I couldn’t see. I couldn’t tell what was happening. There was a flurry of movement on-screen.

  “I don’t see her,” I said, wheezing the words out. “I don’t see her.”

  If the others responded, I didn’t hear them. My ears rang. Suddenly, I was on my feet, but I didn’t remember standing.

  “The hostage is safe,” the reporter said suddenly. “I repeat, John, we are hearing reports that the bomb has been disarmed and the hostage is safe.”

  My body didn’t relax. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t risk believing what she was telling me—then the camera panned. It zoomed in, and just for a moment, I saw her. Ivy.

  The shot was grainy. All I could make out was her hair, a hint of her features, but the way she moved, the way she stood—it was Ivy.

  I sank back into the sofa. It’s done, the text had said. Kostas had gotten what he wanted. He’d let Ivy go. Not because of the president, or the hostage negotiators, or the SWAT team, or the FBI.

  Because somehow he’d gotten word that his son had been pardoned.

  Because of William Keyes.

  Because of me.

  “They’ve got her.” Vivvie said the words slowly, as if she didn’t quite believe them. “She’s okay.”

  Part of me still didn’t believe it. Part of me wouldn’t believe it was really over until Ivy was here, with me.

  “The hostage-taker is coming out,” the reporter said suddenly. “I repeat, the hostage-taker is coming out.”

  I never saw Kostas take that first step out into the open, his hands up. The view was blocked from the cameras. I never saw him give himself up.

  But I did hear the shot that rang out a second later.

  I heard the screams, the chaos.

  I heard confirmation that the hostage-taker was dead.

  CHAPTER 64

  The FBI—or the Secret Service or Homeland Security or the White House, I wasn’t really sure on the details—kept Ivy in seclusion for nearly twenty-four hours. They must have allowed her access to a computer, because her insurance policy didn’t rear its head, but they didn’t let her near a phone.

  I knew this because I knew, in the pit of my stomach, that if she’d had a phone, she would have called me.

  I got a call from Bodie instead. Ivy really was okay. Kostas really was dead—shot with an exploding round before anyone had a chance to see his face. The number of people who knew his real identity could be counted on two hands—and that was why they hadn’t released Ivy right away.

  This, Bodie had been informed, was a matter of national security.

  They wanted to get their stories straight. I deeply suspected that when the dead man’s name was released, it wouldn’t be a name we recognized.

  Major Bharani was dead. Judge Pierce was dead. And now so was Kostas.

  There was no one left to bring to justice—and no one left to tell the story, except for Henry and Asher and Vivvie and me. The White House wanted this kept quiet.

  With the guilty parties dead, I wasn’t saying a word—for Vivvie’s sake, if not my own. Something in my gut told me that Henry would do the same. He would bury this, push it into the recesses of his mind where he kept the secrets that hurt him most. The ones with the potential to hurt the people he loved.

  I wondered if he’d hate Ivy for this, too.

  I wondered if Ivy had ever really been the one he was mad at.

  Ivy’s fine. That was the refrain I repeated to myself, over and over again. She’s fine. She’s fine. She’s coming home. But no matter how many times I told myself that, I could never be more than ninety percent sure, until the moment the door to Adam’s apartment opened and I saw Ivy standing on the other side.

  They must have let her wash up at some point, because she looked as polished as she had the day she came for me at the ranch. Her light brown hair was pulled into a loose French braid at the nape of her neck.

  She walked like she had somewhere to be.

  I stood, frozen in place. Ivy stopped a few feet away from me. I was still so angry with her. I’d been so scared. I’d spent years telling myself that she didn’t matter, that she couldn’t hurt me unless I let her, that we were nothing alike. But the past twenty-four hours had washed all of that away.

  She was in me. She was under my skin, and there in my smile and the shape of my face, and she would always matter. She would always be able to hurt me, and there was nothing I could do, no space I could put between us to erase that.

  She’s here. She’s okay. She’s here. The words beat out a gut-wrenching rhythm in my head. Ivy’s lips trembled slightly. She took one step toward me, then another, then another, until she was right in front of me, and something in me gave. I fell—fell against her, fell into her arms, wrapping mine tightly around her. I buried my head in her shoulder.

  She was shaking—or maybe I was.

  But she was solid and real and fine. I bent, my head against her chest. She breathed in the smell of my hair. I could hear her heart beating.

  “Tessie.” That was all she said, my name.

  I mumbled something into her shirt.

  “What?” Ivy said.

  I repeated myself. “It’s Tess.”

  I slept in Ivy’s room that night, curled into a tiny ball beside her on the king-size bed. In the morning, I could be mad at her. I could hate her for the secrets she’d kept, the lies she’d told—but for now, for this one night, I wasn’t letting her out of my sight.

  Whatever Ivy was—both in the grand scheme of things and to me—w
e were family. Not just in blood, not just because she was somehow responsible for half of my DNA. We were family because I would always love her more than I hated her. Because losing her would have killed me. Because I would have done anything, made a bargain with any devil, to keep her from harm’s way.

  We were family because she would have walked through fire for me.

  For the longest time, we lay there, neither one of us asleep, neither of us saying a word, not even touching.

  I fell asleep to the rhythm of her breaths.

  Sometime later, I woke. Outside, pitch-black was giving way to the first hints of morning. I was alone in Ivy’s bed. Panic shot through me, like ice through my veins, but I forced my heart not to pound, forced my feet onto the floor. I walked through the apartment, down the spiral stairs, and through the foyer, and saw a slant of light coming from the conference room.

  The door was cracked open. I pushed it inward. Ivy sat in the middle of the conference table, staring at the wall. There were three pictures hanging there: Judge Pierce, Major Bharani, and Damien Kostas.

  “Ivy?” I announced my presence because she was staring at the pictures so hard that I wasn’t sure she’d marked my entrance to the room. Ivy turned to look at me. She blinked twice.

  “Sometimes you look like him,” she said, a soft smile playing around the edges of her lips. “Your father.”

  “You loved him.”

  “I did.” She slid off the table and walked toward me. “Some days, I still do.” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. I let her.

  “You’re not my mother.” I softened those words as much as I could. “I don’t know if I can . . . I don’t know what you are.”

  Ivy met my eyes. “I’m yours.”

  It hurt a little less this time. It still cut to hear I mattered to her; inside I still bled—but this time, I didn’t pull back. “Adam said Gramps told you to go.” This wasn’t a conversation I’d ever planned on having with her—but it also wasn’t a conversation I’d believed I would ever again have the opportunity to have. “That summer, when I was thirteen, when you asked me to live with you—Adam said Gramps was the one who told you to go.”