The Fixer
Page 6

“On a Sunday?” Ivy pressed.
“Like you’re one to talk,” Adam retorted. “You never stop working.”
“I do now,” Ivy said, folding her hands in front of her body. “Sunday is the day of rest. This is me, resting. I thought Tess and I might go shopping this afternoon, get some clothes for her first day at Hardwicke.”
Shopping? With Ivy?
Bodie let out a bark of laughter at the expression on my face. “Hate to tell you this, princess, but the kid looks like she’d rather rip out her own thumbnails and use them to gouge out her eye than go shopping with you.”
Ivy wasn’t deterred. “She’ll adjust.”
Adam’s phone rang. He excused himself, leaving me staring down my sister, and Bodie watching the two of us with no small amount of amusement.
“Have you heard from the doctors in Boston yet?” I asked Ivy.
“Not yet.” For a second, I thought that might be all she was going to say, but then she elaborated. “They’ll be doing a complete diagnostic assessment in the next few days.”
Days. I swallowed, unable to keep my mind from latching on to the word. Days. And weeks. And months. And none of it good. I forced my expression to stay neutral. I couldn’t let myself go down that road. I couldn’t think about Gramps. I couldn’t think about the future.
Adam walked back into the room. “Ivy.” His tone was low, serious.
Ivy turned to look at him. “Everything okay?”
Adam glanced at Bodie and me, as if to say, not around the children.
“Let me guess,” Bodie drawled, poking at Adam like someone taunting a bear with a stick. “The Pentagon?”
“That wasn’t the Pentagon,” Adam said curtly. “That was my father.”
His father—the one Adam had said Ivy was on good terms with three years ago. The one she presumably was not on good terms with now.
“And?” Ivy prompted, in a tone that told me that there was always an and with Adam’s father.
“And,” Adam said, his face devoid of emotion, “he was calling to tell me that Theo Marquette was just rushed to Bethesda General. Heart attack. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.” He let that sink in for a second before continuing. “They’ve got a lid on it for now, but the press will know in a matter of hours.”
Ivy took a beat to absorb that information, then locked her hand around Adam’s elbow and pulled him to the side of the room for a hushed conversation. In less than a minute, Ivy was on her phone, barking out commands.
Glancing back over her shoulder at me, she lowered her voice. “Sorry, Tess. Something’s come up. When I have an update on Gramps, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, Bodie can take you shopping for anything you need.”
I should have been grateful for the reprieve—but really, it was just a reminder that Ivy could and would ditch me at the drop of a hat. I might not have known what my sister’s job was, or why news of some guy’s heart attack had sent her into hyperdrive, or even why the name Theo Marquette sounded vaguely familiar in the first place. But the one thing I did know was that Adam was right—Ivy never should have brought me here.
It was only a matter of time before she dropped me for good.
I didn’t say a word when Ivy shut herself in her office, or when she left the house, power walking like the devil was on her heels. I let Bodie make me pancakes. It wasn’t until later, after I’d eaten four of them, that I realized suddenly where I’d heard the name Theo Marquette before.
Theodore Marquette was the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.
CHAPTER 6
Ivy was still in crisis mode the next morning, but—lucky me—she managed to carve half an hour out of her schedule to take me to school. In the back of my mind, I’d expected the illustrious Hardwicke School to look like Hogwarts. Needless to say, I was severely disappointed. The Upper School—because heaven forbid they call it a high school—looked like nothing so much as a granola bar turned on its side.
“The facilities here are just fantastic,” Ivy told me as we walked down a stone path toward the historic home that served as the administrative building. “The Maxwell Art Center has one of the largest auditoriums in the city. The Upper School just added a state-of-the-art robotics lab. And you should see the new gymnasium.”
I gazed out at the nearby playing fields. The wind sifted through my hair, lifting a few strands upward, and for a moment, looking out at the massive stretch of green in front of me, I could almost forget where I was.
“Now or never.” Ivy’s voice brought me back. “And you’re not allowed to say never.”
“You don’t have to come with me,” I told her, hooking my thumbs lazily through my belt loops. “I’m sure you have more important things to do.”
As if to accentuate the point, Ivy’s pocket began to vibrate.
“It can wait,” Ivy told me, but I could practically see her fingertips twitching to answer it.
“Go ahead.” I gestured to the phone. “Maybe there’s an update on Justice Marquette’s condition. Or maybe the president has a head cold. You get calls for that, too, right?”
Ivy looked up at the sky. I wondered if she was asking God for patience. “That moment,” she said under her breath, “when you realize that sarcasm is hereditary.”
Before I could formulate a suitable reply, the door to the administrative building opened, and my sister and I were ushered inside.
“Ms. Kendrick.” The headmaster’s assistant had suburban-soccer-mom hair. She was wearing a peach twinset, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was about to offer us lemonade. Or cookies. Or possibly both. “And you must be Theresa.”
“She goes by Tess,” Ivy said, as if I were five years old and incapable of speaking for myself.
“Tess it is, then,” the woman replied gamely. “We were so sorry to hear about your grandfather, dear.”
I couldn’t help feeling gut-punched. I’d spent the past year hiding my grandfather’s condition. Ivy, apparently, had taken out a billboard announcing it to the world.
“But we’re very happy you’ll be joining us here at Hardwicke,” the woman continued, oblivious to my train of thought. “I’m Mrs. Perkins. If you’ll wait just a moment, Headmaster Raleigh will be—”