JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
Any problem can be fixed for a price . . . even when the stakes are deadly.
A
lso by J ennifer L ynn B arnes
The I nheritance Games Saga
The I nheritance Games
The Inheritance Games
The Hawthorne Legacy
The Final Gambit
The Brothers Hawthorne
T he G randest G ame
The Grandest Game
Glorious Rivals
Coming next: The Grandest Game 3
Games Untold
The Same Backward as Forward
The Debutantes
Little White Lies
Deadly Little Scandals
THE FIXER
The Ruling Class
Lessons in Power
THE S quad
Perfect Cover
Killer Spirit
The Lovely and the Lost
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First published in the USA as The Fixer by Bloomsbury Children’s Books 2015
Paperback edition first published in the USA by Bloomsbury Children’s Books 2016 This edition published in the USA by Bloomsbury YA and in Great Britain by Penguin Books 2025 001
Text copyright © Jennifer Lynn Barnes, 2015 Illustrations copyright © Jim Tierney, 2025
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For Allison, sister-in-law extraordinaire
CHAPTER 1
As far as I could tell, my history teacher had three passions in life: quoting Shakespeare, identifying historical inaccuracies in cable TV shows, and berating Ryan Washburn. “Eighteen sixty-three, Mr. Washburn. Is that so hard to remember? Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in eighteen sixty-three.”
Ryan was a big guy: a little on the quiet side, a little shy. I had no idea what it was about him that had convinced Mr. Simpson he needed to be taken down a notch—or seven. But more and more, this was how history class went: Simpson called on Ryan, repeatedly, until he made a mistake. And then it began.
As Mr. Simpson railed on, Ryan stared at his desk, his head bowed so far that his chin gouged his collarbone. Sitting directly to his left, I could see the tension in his shoulder muscles, the sweat starting to bead up on his neck.
My grip on my pencil tightened.
“Where is that incredible promise I hear my colleagues chatting about in the teachers’ lounge?” Mr. Simpson asked Ryan
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
facetiously. “You have a lot of fans at this school, Mr. Washburn. Surely they can’t all be mistaken about your intellectual capacity. Perhaps the emancipation of every enslaved human being in this country is simply not significant enough to merit a student of your remarkable caliber taking note of the date?”
“I’m sorry,” Ryan mumbled. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
Something inside me snapped. “It wasn’t all of the slaves,” I said evenly.
Mr. Simpson’s eyes narrowed and flicked over to me. “Did you have something to share with the class, Ms. Kendrick?”
“Yes.” I’d long since shed the Southern accent I’d had when I’d moved to Montana at the age of four, but I still had a habit of taking my time with my words. “The Emancipation Proclamation,” I continued, at my own languid pace, “only freed slaves in the Confederate states. The remaining nine hundred thousand slaves weren’t freed until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in eighteen sixty-five.”
A muscle in Mr. Simpson’s jaw ticked. “ ‘The fool doth think he is wise,’ Ms. Kendrick, ‘but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ ”
I’d been up working since five that morning. Beside me, Ryan still hadn’t managed to raise his gaze from his desk.
I leaned back in my seat. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
“Want to tell me why you’re here?” The guidance counselor scrolled through my file. When I didn’t provide an immediate answer, she looked up from the computer, folded her hands on the desk, and leaned forward. “I’m concerned, Tess.”
“If you’re talking about the way Mr. Simpson victimizes his most vulnerable students, I am, too.”
The words victimize and vulnerable were guidance counselor kryptonite. She pressed her lips together in a thin line. “And you think inappropriate backchat”—she read the phrase off the slip Mr. Simpson had written me—“is the most constructive way of expressing your concerns?”
I decided that was a rhetorical question.
“Tess, this time last year, you were on the girls’ track team. You had nearly perfect attendance. You were, by all reports, sociable enough.”
Not sociable, but sociable enough.
“Now I’m getting reports of you falling asleep in class, skipping assignments. You’ve already missed five days this semester, and we’re not even three weeks in.”
I shouldn’t have stayed home when I had the flu, I thought dully. I’d given myself two days to recover. With absences racking up, that was two days too many. I should have kept my mouth shut in Simpson’s class. I couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself. To my situation. I knew that.
“You quit the track team.” The guidance counselor was relentless in her onslaught. “You no longer seem to associate with any of your peers.”
“My peers and I don’t have much in common.”
I’d never been popular. But I used to have friends—people to sit with at lunch, people who might ask questions if they thought something was wrong.
And that was the problem. These days, friends were a luxury I couldn’t afford.
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
It was easy enough to make people give up on you if that was the goal.
“I’m afraid I have no choice but to call your grandfather.” The guidance counselor reached for the phone.
Don’t, I thought. But she was already dialing. I gritted my teeth to keep from reacting and tipping my hand. I forced myself to breathe. Gramps probably wouldn’t answer. If he did, if it went badly, I already had a stack of excuses ready to go.
You must have caught him getting up from a nap.
It’s this new medication his doctor has him on.
He’s not much of a phone person.
The fifteen or twenty seconds it took her to give up on someone answering were torture. My heart still pounding in my ears, I pushed back the urge to shudder with relief. “You didn’t leave a message.” My voice sounded amazingly calm.
“Messages get deleted,” she said dryly. “I’ll try again later.”
The knots in my stomach tightened. I’d dodged a bullet. But with Gramps the way he was, I couldn’t afford to sit around and wait for round two. She wanted me to talk. She wanted me to share. Fine.
“Ryan Washburn,” I said. “Mr. Simpson has it in for him. He’s a nice kid. Quiet. Smart.” I paused. “He leaves that class every day feeling stupid.”
It shouldn’t have been my job to tell her this.
“Do you know what we do out at my grandfather’s ranch? Other than raise cattle?” I caught her gaze, willing her not to look away. “We take in the horses no one else wants, the ones who’ve been abused and broken and shattered inside until there’s nothing left but animal anger and animal fear. We try to
break through that. Sometimes we win.” I paused. “Sometimes we don’t.”
“Tess—”
“I don’t like bullies.” I stood to leave. “Feel free to call my grandfather and tell him that. I’d say it’s a good bet he already knows.”
CHAPTER 2
My gamble appeared to have paid off. The phone didn’t ring that night. Or the next. I kept a low profile at school. I got up early, stayed up late, and held my world together through sheer force of will. It wasn’t much of a routine, but it was mine. By Thursday afternoon, I’d stopped expecting the worst.
That was a mistake.
Standing in the middle of the paddock, my feet planted wide and my arms hanging loose by my sides, I eyed the horse channeling Beelzebub a few feet away. “Hey now,” I said softly. “That’s not very ladylike.”
The animal’s nostrils flared, but she didn’t rear back again.
“Someday,” I murmured, my voice edging up on a croon, “I’d like to meet your first owner in a dark alleyway.” Behind me, the sound of creaking wood alerted me to the arrival of company. I half expected that to send the horse into another fit, but instead, the animal took a few hesitant steps toward me.
“She’s beautiful.”
I froze. I recognized that voice—and instantly wished that I hadn’t. Two words. After all this time, that was all it took.
My chest tightened.
“I’ll be a while,” I said. I didn’t let myself turn around. This particular visitor wasn’t worth getting riled up over.
“It’s been too long, Tess.”
Whose fault is that? I didn’t bother responding out loud.
“You’re good with her. The horse.” Ivy didn’t sound the least bit angry at being ignored. That was the way it was with her—sugar and spice and everything nice, right up to the point when she wasn’t.
Go away, I thought. The horse in front of me gave a violent jerk of her head, picking up on the tension in my body. “Hey,” I murmured to her. “Hey now.” She slammed her front hooves into the ground. I got the message and began to back away.
“We need to talk,” Ivy told me when I reached the outer limits of the paddock. Like her presence on the ranch was an everyday occurrence. Like talking was something the two of us did.
I jumped the fence. “I need a shower,” I countered.
Ivy could not argue with my logic. Or more likely, she chose not to. I had the sense that the great Ivy Kendrick was the kind of person who could successfully argue just about any point— but what did I know? It had been almost three years since the last time I’d seen her.
“After your shower, we need to talk.” Ivy was nothing if not persistent. I deeply suspected that she wasn’t used to people telling her no. Luckily, there were benefits to being the kind of person known for taking my time with words. I didn’t have to say no. Instead, I walked toward the house, my stride outpacing hers, even though she had an inch or two on me.
“I got a call from your guidance counselor,” Ivy said behind me. “And then I made some calls of my own.”
Her words didn’t slow me down, but my gut twisted like a wet towel being wrung out and then wrung out again.
“I talked to the ranch hands,” Ivy continued. I climbed up on the front porch, flung open the door, and let it slam behind me when I’d stepped inside. There was a time when slamming a door would have drawn my grandfather’s attention. He would have called me a heathen, threatened to scalp me, and sent me back out onto the porch to “try again.”
Not anymore.
Ivy’s been asking questions. I escaped to the second floor but couldn’t get away from the certainty bubbling up inside me. She knows.
“Enjoy your shower,” Ivy called after me. “Then we’ll talk.”
She was like a broken record. And she knew. I’d tried so hard to keep this secret, to take care of my grandfather, to do this one thing for the man who’d done everything for me, and now . . .
I wasn’t sure exactly what Ivy did in Washington. I didn’t know for a fact that she still lived there. I couldn’t have told you if she was single or dating someone—she might have even been married. What I did know—what I was trying very hard not to know—was that if Ivy had deigned to fly out to Montana and grace the ranch with her presence, she’d done so for a reason.
My sister was a mover, a shaker, a problem solver—and right now, the problem she’d set her sights on solving was me.
CHAPTER 3
I gave myself three minutes to shower. I couldn’t afford to leave Ivy alone with Gramps for longer than that. I shouldn’t have left them alone at all, but I needed a moment. I needed to think.
I hadn’t seen Ivy in nearly three years. She used to make it out to the ranch every few months. The last time she’d come to visit, she’d asked me if I wanted to move to DC and live with her. At thirteen, I’d worshipped the ground my sister walked on. I’d said yes. We’d had plans. And then she’d left. Without any explanation. Without taking me with her.
Without saying good-bye.
She hadn’t been back since. If I can convince her that Gramps and I are okay, she’ll leave again. That should have been comforting. It should have been my glimmer of hope.
I wasn’t thirteen anymore. It shouldn’t have hurt.
I tossed on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and towel-dried my devil-may-care, too-thick hair. Ivy and I were bookend brunettes,
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
my hair a shade too light to be considered black and my sister’s a fraction too dark to be blond.
She met me at the bottom of the stairs. “You ready to talk?” Her voice sounded like mine. She spoke faster, but the pitch was the same. I felt a familiar rush of anger. “Did you ever think that maybe I don’t want to talk to you?”
Ivy’s mask of pleasantness faltered, just for a second. “I got that general sense when you didn’t return my last three phone calls,” she said softly.
Christmas. My birthday. Ivy’s birthday. My sister called home exactly three times a year. I’d stopped picking up at approximately the same time that my grandfather had started forgetting little things like keys and names and turning off the stove.
Gramps. I willed myself to concentrate on what mattered here. There’s a situation. It’s my job to get it under control. I rounded the corner into the kitchen, unsure of what I would find.
“ ’Bout time, Bear.” My grandfather greeted me with a ruffle of my hair and a cuff to the shoulder.
He knows me. Relief washed over my body. Bear had been his nickname for me for as long as I could remember.
“Look who’s finally come to visit,” Gramps said, nodding toward Ivy. His voice was gruff, but his hazel eyes were sparkling.
This is good, I thought. I can work with this. I’d been covering for my grandfather’s lapses for the past year. More frequently now than a year ago.
More frequently now than a month ago.
But if today was a good day, Ivy didn’t have to know that. If there was one thing experience had taught me, it was that she wouldn’t stick around to find out.
“I know, Gramps,” I said, taking a seat at the rickety wooden table that had been falling apart in my grandfather’s kitchen for longer than I’d been alive. “I can’t believe we actually merited an in-person Ivy checkup.”
My sister’s dark brown eyes locked on to mine.
“Ivy? Who’s Ivy?” My grandfather gave Ivy a conspiratorial grin before turning back to me. “You got an imaginary friend there, Bear?”
My heart skipped a beat. I could do this. I had to do this. For Gramps.
“I don’t know,” I replied, my fingers digging into the underside of my chair. “Is ‘imaginary friend’ what they’re calling perpetually absent siblings these days?”
“You’re the one who stopped returning my calls,” Ivy cut in.
Good. Let her focus on me. Let her get mad at me. Anything to keep her from realizing that whatever she’d managed to glean from talking to my guidance counselor and the ranch hands—it wasn’t even the half of it. Nobody knew how bad things were.
Nobody but me.
“I didn’t return your calls because I didn’t feel like talking,” I told Ivy through gritted teeth. “You can’t just check out of our lives and then expect me to drop everything when you finally decide to pick up a phone.”
“That’s not what happened, Tessie, and you know it.”
Getting a rise out of Ivy felt better than it should have. “It’s Tess.”
“Actually,” she snapped back, “it’s Theresa.”
“For goodness’ sakes, Nora,” my grandfather cut in. “She’s only here for two weeks each summer. Don’t get your panties in a twist over a few missed calls.”
Ivy’s face went from frustrated to gutted in two seconds flat. Nora was our mother’s name. I barely remembered her, but Ivy was twenty-one when our parents died. The age difference between the two of us always felt massive, but the fact that Ivy had spent seventeen more years with Mom and Dad—that was truly the great divide. To me, the ranch was home, and our grandfather was the only real parent I’d ever known. To Ivy, he was just the grandpa she’d spent two weeks with every summer growing up.
It occurred to me, then, that when she was little, he might have called her Bear, too.
He thinks I’m Ivy, and he thinks Ivy is Mom. There was no covering for this, no barbed comment I could toss out that would make Ivy brush it off. For the longest time, she just sat there, staring at Gramps. Then she blinked, and when her eyes opened again, it was like none of it had ever happened, like she was a robot who’d just rebooted to avoid running a program called “excess emotion.”
“Harry,” she said, addressing our grandfather by his first name. “I’m Ivy. Your granddaughter. This is Tess.”
“I know who she is,” he grunted. I tried not to see the uncertainty in his eyes.
“You do,” Ivy replied, her voice soothing but no-nonsense. “And you also know that she can’t stay here. You can’t stay here.”
“Like hell we can’t!” I bolted to my feet.
My grandfather slammed his palm into the table. “Language, Theresa!”
Just like that, I was me again, if only for the moment.
“Give us a minute, Tess,” Ivy ordered.
“Go on, Bear.” My grandfather looked old suddenly—and very, very tired. In that instant, I would have done anything he asked. I would have done anything to have him back.
I left them alone in the kitchen. In the living room, I paced as the minutes ticked by. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Around the furniture, in little figure eights, from one side of the room to the other.
“You used to do that when you were little.” Ivy appeared in the doorway, hovering there for a moment before taking a seat on the couch. “You’d do loops around Mom’s feet, the coffee table. Other babies learned to walk. You learned to pace.” She smiled slightly. “It drove her nuts.”
Ivy and I had only lived in the same house for that one year, when I was a baby and she was a senior in high school. I wished sometimes that I could remember it, but even if I could, she’d still be a stranger—one who threatened everything I’d worked so hard to protect.
“You should have called me when things got bad, Tess.”
Called her? I should have picked up a phone and called her, when she couldn’t even be bothered to visit?
“I’m handling it, Ivy.” I cursed myself, cursed the guidance counselor for making the call. “We’re fine.”
“No, sweetie, you’re not.”
She didn’t get to come here, after years, and tell me I wasn’t fine. She didn’t get to insert herself into our lives, and she didn’t get to call me sweetie.
“There’s a treatment center in Boston,” she continued calmly. “The best in the country. There’s a waiting list for the inpatient facility, but I made some calls.”
My stomach twisted sharply. Gramps loved this ranch. He was this ranch. It wouldn’t survive without him. I’d given up everything—track, friends, the hope of ever getting a good night’s sleep—to keep him here, to keep things running, to take care of him, the way he’d always taken care of me.
“Gramps is fine.” I set my jaw in a mutinous line. “He gets confused sometimes, but he’s fine.”
“He needs a doctor, Tessie.”
“So take him to a doctor.” I swallowed hard, feeling like I’d already lost. “Figure out what we need to do, what I need to do, and then bring him home.”
“You can’t stay here, Tess.” Ivy reached for my hand. I jerked it back. “You’ve been taking care of him,” she continued softly. “Who’s been taking care of you?”
“I can take care of myself.”
The set of her jaw matched my own. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“She’s right, Bear.” I looked up to see Gramps standing in the doorway. “Don’t you worry about me, girlie,” he ordered. He was lucid—and intractable.
“You don’t have to do this, Gramps,” I told him. My words fell on deaf ears.
“You’re a good girl, Tess,” he said gruffly. He met my sister’s eyes and something passed unspoken between them. After a long moment, Ivy turned back to me.
“Until we get things settled, I want you to come back with me.” She held up a hand to cut off my objections. “I’ve talked to a school in DC. You start on Monday.”
CHAPTER 4
“I’d tell you that you can’t stay mad forever,” Ivy commented, “but I’m pretty sure you’d take that as a challenge.”
I hadn’t spoken to my sister once since we’d checked my grandfather into the facility in Boston. She kept telling me how nice it was, how highly thought of the specialists were, how often we could go to visit. None of that changed the fact that we left him there. I left him. He would wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented, and I wouldn’t be there. He would frantically start looking for the grandmother who’d died before I was even born, and I wouldn’t be there.
He would have good days, and I wouldn’t be there.
If the silent treatment was getting to Ivy, she showed no sign of it as we navigated the DC airport. Her heels clicked against the tile as she stepped off the escalator and glided into the kind of graceful power walk that made everyone else in the airport look twice and get out of her way. She paused for an instant when we came to a row of men in black
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
suits holding carefully lettered signs. Chauffeurs. At the very end of the line was a man wearing a navy blue T-shirt and ripped jeans.
There was a hint of stubble on his suntanned face and a pack of cigarettes in his left hand. In his right hand he, too, held a carefully lettered sign. But instead of writing his client’s last name, he’d opted for: pain in the *%$&@.
Ivy stalked up to him and handed him her carry-on. “Cute.”
He smirked. “I thought so.”
She rolled her eyes. “Tess, meet Bodie. He was my driver and personal assistant, but as of five seconds ago, he’s fired.”
“I prefer ‘Jack-of-All-Trades,’ ” Bodie interjected. “And I’m only fired until there’s a female you can’t sweet-talk or a law you won’t br—”
Ivy cut him off with an all-powerful glare. I mentally finished his sentence: I’m only fired until there’s a female you can’t sweet-talk or a law you won’t break. I darted a glance at Ivy, my eyebrows shooting up. What exactly did my sister do that she needed a chauffeur willing to break laws on her behalf?
Ivy ignored my raised brows and plowed on, unperturbed. “Now would be a good time to get our bags,” she told Bodie.
“You can get your own bags, princess,” Bodie retorted. “I’m fired.” He rocked back on his heels. “I will, however, help Tess here with hers out of the goodness of my heart.” Bodie didn’t wink at me or smirk, but somehow, I felt as if he’d done both. “I’m very philanthropic,” he added.
I didn’t reply, but I did let him help me with my bags. The cigarettes disappeared into his back pocket the moment my duffels
came into view. Muscles bulged under his T-shirt as he grabbed a bag in each hand.
He didn’t look like anyone’s chauffeur.
Ivy’s house loomed over the pavement, boxy and tall, with twin chimneys on either side. It seemed too big for one person.
“I live on the second floor,” Ivy clarified as she, Bodie, and I made our way into the house. “I work on the first.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to ask Ivy what work entailed, but I didn’t. My sister had always been mysteriously close-lipped about her life in Washington. Asking for details now would be taken as a sign of interest.
I’m not interested.
Stepping into an enormous foyer, I concentrated on the sight in front of me: dark wood floors and massive columns gave the expanse the look of a ballroom. To my left, there was an alcove lined with bay windows, and behind that, a hallway lined with doors.
“The closed doors go to the conference room and my office. Both are off-limits. The main kitchen is through there, but we mostly use it for entertaining.”
We? I wondered. I didn’t let myself get further than that as I followed Ivy up a spiral staircase to what appeared to be a sparsely decorated apartment. “The kitchen up here is more of a kitchenette,” she told me. “I don’t cook much. We mostly order in.”
Bodie cleared his throat and when she didn’t respond the first time, he repeated the action, only louder.
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
“We mostly order in, and sometimes Bodie makes pancakes downstairs,” Ivy amended. I took that to mean that Bodie was definitely part of Ivy’s we.
“Do you live here, Bodie?” I asked, darting a sideways glance at Ivy’s “driver.”
He choked on his own spit. “Ahh . . . no,” he said, once he’d recovered. “I don’t live here.” I must have looked skeptical, because he elaborated. “Kid, I worked for your sister for a year and a half before she even invited me up here, and that was only because she broke the plumbing.”
“I did not break the plumbing,” Ivy replied testily. “It broke itself.” She turned back to me. “Your room is through here.”
My room? I thought. She spoke so casually, I could almost believe that I wasn’t just some unpleasant surprise that fate and Alzheimer’s had dropped in her lap.
“Don’t you mean the guest room?” I asked.
Ivy opened the bedroom door, and I realized that the room was completely empty—no furniture. Nothing.
Not a guest room.
The room was mostly square, with a nook by the window and a ceiling that sloped on either side. The floors were a dark mahogany wood. A series of mirrors doubled as sliding doors to the closet.
“I thought you might like to decorate it yourself.” Ivy stepped into the room. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said she looked almost nervous. “I know it’s a little on the small side, but it’s my favorite room in the house. And you’ve got your own bathroom.”
The room was beautiful, but even thinking that felt disloyal. “Where am I going to sleep?” I asked.
“Wherever you put the bed.” Ivy’s reply was brusque, like she’d caught herself caring and managed to put a cork in it.
“Where am I going to sleep until I get a bed?” I asked, checking the impulse to roll my eyes.
“Tell me what kind of bed you want,” Ivy replied, “and Bodie will make sure it gets here tonight. I’ve got some furniture catalogs you can look at.”
I stared at my sister, wondering if she realized just how ridiculous that plan sounded. “I don’t think furniture companies do same-day delivery on a Saturday night,” I said, stating the obvious.
Bodie set my bags against the wall and then leaned back against the doorjamb. “They do,” he told me, “if you’re Ivy Kendrick.”
CHAPTER 5
The next morning, when I woke up in the bed I’d selected more or less randomly from one of Ivy’s catalogs, there was no escaping the physical reminders of where I was. And where I wasn’t. The bed beneath me was too comfortable. The ceiling above wasn’t my ceiling. Everything about this felt wrong.
I thought of Gramps, waking up in Boston and staring at a strange ceiling of his own. Pushing back against the suffocating wave of emotion that washed over me just thinking about it, I got up, got dressed, and pondered the fact that the mere mention of my sister’s name had been enough to make furniture appear within hours of being ordered. Back on the ranch, she’d managed to have herself declared my legal guardian and obtained our grandfather’s power of attorney almost as quickly.
Who did that? And more importantly—who could?
I should have known what my sister did for a living. I should have known Ivy. But I didn’t. Making my way out of the bedroom, I found the loft empty, a visceral reminder that it had always
been my sister’s choice not to know me. She was the one who’d left. She was the one who’d stopped answering my calls.
Whoever she was, whatever she did—she’d chosen this life over me.
The muted sound of voices rose up from downstairs. At the top of the spiral staircase, I paused. The female voice was unmistakably Ivy’s. The person she was talking to was male.
“You don’t think that this was, just possibly, a little bit impulsive?” The mystery man’s tone of voice made it quite clear that he thought little bit was an understatement.
“Impulsive, Adam?” Ivy shot back. “You’re the one who taught me to trust my instincts.”
“This wasn’t instinct,” the man—Adam—countered. “This was guilt, Ivy.”
“I’m not debating this with you.”
“Evidence would suggest you are.”
“Adam”—I could practically hear Ivy clenching her teeth—“if you want me to look into your little friend at the DOJ, you’ll stop talking. Now.”
For several seconds, there was silence, followed by a grunt of frustration.
“What do you want me to do, Adam?” my sister asked finally, her voice soft enough now that I had to strain to hear. “Things were bad in Montana. I’m not sending her back, and I am not shipping her off to some boarding school. And don’t give me that look—you were the one who told me to bring her here three years ago!”
Realizing that they were arguing about me turned my body to stone. And what did Ivy mean that Adam was the one who had
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
suggested she invite me to live with her the first time around? Who was this guy? Why had she listened to him?
Why had she changed her mind?
Some memories were like scars. This one had never healed right. Just hearing Ivy talk about it ripped off the scab.
“Three years ago, bringing Tess here might have been the right call.” Adam’s voice was terse. “But things change, Ivy. Three years ago, you were on speaking terms with my father.”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and the stair beneath me creaked. The voices below went suddenly quiet. They’d heard me. I had a split second to decide on a course of action. I went with “pretend you weren’t just eavesdropping and walk down the stairs.”
“Ivy?” I called out. “You down there?”
Ivy met me at the bottom of the steps. Her light brown hair was loosely coiffed at the nape of her neck. She wore a formfitting blazer as comfortably as most people wore sweatshirts. Even her jeans looked expensive. If she saw through my innocent act, she didn’t call me on it. “Good,” she said. “You’re up.”
I had an excellent poker face, refined by years of playing actual poker with gruff old men. “I’m up.”
Ivy smiled, gleaming white teeth covering for the fact that she didn’t look happy in the least. “Adam,” she called out, her voice so pleasant my teeth ached from the sugar in her tone. “Come meet Tess.”
I had two seconds to wonder what the man would look like before he rounded the corner. He was a couple of years older than Ivy. If I’d had to guess, I would have put his height at exactly six
feet. No more. No less. His posture was perfect; every muscle in his face was tightly controlled. His eyes met mine, and that control wavered. Just for a second, this stranger looked at me the way Ivy had looked at our grandfather when he’d called her by Mom’s name.
The expression was gone from his face in an instant. “Tess,” he said, holding out his right hand, “I’m Adam Keyes. It’s nice to meet you.” His words sounded genuine. He looked like an honest enough guy. But given that Adam Keyes thought bringing me here was a mistake, I somehow doubted he was all that pleased to meet me.
I took his hand. “Yeah,” I said. “You, too.”
He waited, like he thought I might elaborate, but I didn’t say anything else.
“Ivy tells me you’ll be starting at Hardwicke tomorrow,” Adam said, trying to make conversation. “You’ll like it there. It’s a great school.” He raised an eyebrow at the expression on my face. “Not a big fan of school, I take it?”
“School’s fine.” Again, he waited, and again, I left it at that.
“But you’d rather be outside,” Adam elaborated on my behalf. I glanced over at Ivy, wondering what she had told him about me—wondering how she even knew that about me, when the two of us were practically strangers.
“My brother was like that,” Adam said, clearing his throat. “IQ off the charts, but his favorite subject was recess.”
“And how’d that work out for him?” I asked, trying to decide whether or not I’d just been insulted.
A small, fleeting smile passed over Adam’s face. “He joined the army the day he graduated from high school.”
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
Bodie announced his presence by slamming the front door. “Somebody call for pancakes?”
The smile hardened on Adam’s face. Apparently, he wasn’t as fond of my sister’s driver as she was. “I should go,” Adam said stiffly. “I need to stop by the office.”
“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.”
JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
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 suburbansoccer-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—”
A compact man with dark hair and a beard made his way around the corner. Mrs. Perkins cut off her previous sentence with a smile. “And here he is now.”
“Ivy.” The headmaster greeted Ivy by name and reached both of his hands out to take hers.
“Headmaster Raleigh,” she returned, in a tone that made me think that under typical circumstances, she’d leave the headmaster off. “I appreciate you making this happen.”
“Yes, well . . .” Headmaster Raleigh plucked his glasses off his face and began polishing them against his shirt. “We think that you—and Tess—will fi t in with the Hardwicke family quite well.”
“I know my way around Hardwicke,” Ivy replied, in a tone that made me wonder what experience she’d had with the school—and why the headmaster looked uncomfortable with the reminder. “This is the right place for Tess.”
“And, of course,” the headmaster added, “you can expect us to respect your sister’s privacy. Just as we respect the privacy of all of our students.”
There was subtext there—a warning.
“What happens at Hardwicke stays at Hardwicke,” Ivy said smoothly. “Believe me, I know.”
“Am I early?” a voice piped up from the doorway. I turned to look at the girl who stood there. Ivy and Headmaster Raleigh kept their eyes on each other.
“You are right on time,” Mrs. Perkins told the girl cheerfully, ignoring the tension in the room. “Tess, this is Vivvie Bharani. Since you girls are in most of the same classes, she’s going to be showing you around today.”
Vivvie was an inch or two taller than me with dark brown skin, a round face, and wavy black hair that she wore pulled into loose pigtails. She offered me a hopeful smile. “I know,” she said apologetically. “This whole ‘hey, new girl, go with the total stranger’ thing is kind of cliché, but don’t think of me as your school-assigned buddy.” Her smile brightened. “Think of me as your travel guide to a strange and bewildering country, where the locals are always restless and the bathrooms are impossible to find.” There was an energy to Vivvie, an earnestness that made her very hard not to like.
“And as your travel guide,” she continued, bringing her right hand to her heart, like she was pledging allegiance, “I am morally obligated to tell you that if we don’t leave now, the Hut will be totally sold out of everything bagels by the time we get there.”
She paused to let what I could only assume was the seriousness of that sink in. “You cannot possibly be prepared for your first day at Hardwicke with only some things in your morning bagel.”
I glanced over at Ivy and the headmaster, who’d finally ended their friendly little staring match. Then I turned back to Vivvie. “After you.”
CHAPTER 7
The Hardwicke Hut was essentially a student-run coffee shop that didn’t serve coffee.
“Two everything bagels,” Vivvie ordered, with the air of a fairy godmother granting a most elaborate wish. “And do not tell me you’re out,” she told the boy behind the counter. “You are not out of everything bagels. The world would not be so cruel.”
“We’re not out,” the boy replied. “But there’s only one left. The world is a little bit cruel.”
Vivvie put on a brave face. “In that case, Tess will have an everything bagel, and I’ll have—”
“Half of mine?” I suggested. I would have given her the whole thing, but I wasn’t sure she’d take it.
“I knew I liked you!” Vivvie beamed. As we slid over to await our order, a trio of girls started making their way to the counter. Vivvie mistook my registering their presence as a sign of interest.
“The one on the left is Maya Rojas,” Vivvie told me, like this was some kind of nature documentary and she was narrating. “She’s a three-sport captain. As a junior.” Apparently, at Hardwicke, that made Maya a person to know. “The one next to her, with the white-blond hair?” Vivvie continued. “That’s Di. She’s from Iceland.”
“Di?” I repeated. “As in Diana?” That didn’t exactly sound Icelandic to me.
“Errr . . . no. It’s actually short for something else.” Vivvie tried and failed to sound inconspicuous.
“What’s it short for?”
Vivvie hesitated. “It’s Di as in D period I period. And it’s short for diplomatic immunity.” Vivvie had the decency to look a little sheepish. “Di’s father is an ambassador, and her real name is pretty much impossible to pronounce. Plus she never turns down dares. Like, ever.”
A teenage girl with diplomatic immunity and a fondness for dares. That won’t end well.
That just left the third girl. Vivvie didn’t get the chance to tell me anything about her, because a second later, the girl in question spotted us. She cut across the Hut like a homing pigeon.
“Vivvie, aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?” Without waiting for Vivvie to respond, the girl plowed forward. “I’m Emilia Rhodes.”
“Tess,” I said. For a moment, Emilia and I studied each other. She was tall, with strawberry-blond hair and eyes that walked the line between green and blue. She wore almost no makeup, except for a light gloss on her lips. “So you’re Ivy Kendrick’s sister,” she said finally. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“I’ll get right to work on that.”
Emilia cracked a very small smile. “Hardwicke almost never accepts midsemester transfers,” she said. “Your sister must have pulled some very impressive strings.”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
Emilia might have continued cross-examining me, but Vivvie pulled her attention away. “I saw the news about Justice Marquette online,” Vivvie told her. “Have you heard from Henry at all?”
Emilia gave a brief shake of her head. “Neither has Asher. Henry Marquette isn’t really one for communication. Or sharing. Or the outward display of human emotion of any kind.” Coming from Emilia, that didn’t sound like a criticism. “We’ll hear what happens from the papers before we hear it from Henry.”
Having placed their orders, Maya and Di appeared behind Emilia, like an athletic angel and an Icelandic devil on her shoulders.
“My mom’s already running numbers,” Maya commented. “The president wasn’t expecting to appoint a justice this term. It could be a game changer.”
“Maya,” Emilia interjected, cutting off that topic of conversation completely. “Di.” She looked from one girl to the other. “Meet Tess Kendrick.”
“Ivy Kendrick’s little sister?” Maya raised an eyebrow. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”
“Who’s Ivy Kendrick?” Di asked. Her hair was so pale it practically gave off light. Her accent was sharp—and impossible to ignore.
“Remember the time you got me arrested, Miss Diplomatic Immunity?” Maya shot back.
Di tilted her head to the side. “This sounds vaguely familiar.”