The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(28)

This was Vivvie talking about what a fight with her father was like. Not the fight she’d had with him after the wake.

“This time was different,” I said. I kept my voice low and stayed away from questions. Questions required answers. I was stating facts.

Vivvie slowly unwound her hand from her shirt. “This time was different,” she echoed, her voice barely more than a whisper. “He grabbed me. He didn’t mean to.” She paused. “I know what that sounds like, Tess. I do. But it’s been just the two of us for years, and he’s never . . .”

We were still standing in the foyer. The house was immaculate: everything in its place.

“You weren’t in school today.” I stuck to statements—nonthreatening ones—as best I could. “You weren’t in school most of last week, either.”

“I’m not hiding any more bruises,” Vivvie said quickly. She could see how this looked. “Last week, my dad and I weren’t even—we weren’t fighting. I just told him I was sick, and he let me stay home.”

She’d told him she was sick. But she wasn’t.

“You have to come back to school eventually,” I said gently. What I didn’t say was: Who or what are you avoiding?

What I didn’t say was: What were you and your father fighting about?

“I’ll come back to school tomorrow,” Vivvie told me. “I swear.” I could feel the nervous energy rolling off her. She was starting to panic about what she’d told me—even though she hadn’t said much at all.

“I need some air,” I told her. We both knew that I wasn’t the one who needed it. “You want to go for a walk?”

After a long moment, her head bobbed in something I took as a nod. She slipped on a pair of shoes, and we started walking: out the front door, down the sidewalk, around her neighborhood. Neither of us said a word. I could feel Vivvie trying to reel it in. Trying to be strong. This was a girl who didn’t want to bother classmates she’d known her entire life by asking to sit at their tables for lunch. No matter how badly she needed my help, she wouldn’t ask for it.

She couldn’t.

Matching the rhythm of my steps to hers, I willed my presence to do the talking for me. You are not a bother. You are not alone.

One block. Two. Eventually, Vivvie’s arms wrapped their way around her torso again.

“Are you okay?” I asked her. I met her eyes. “I know that’s your line. I was just trying it out.”

She managed a small smile. We fell quiet. In that silence, she must have reached a tipping point, because she was the one who spoke next.

“Have you ever known something you desperately wished you didn’t know?” Vivvie’s voice was rough in her throat, like she almost couldn’t choke out the words. We kept walking, slow and steady, as I processed the question.

She was asking me to tell her that she wasn’t alone.

“Yes,” I said, my own voice coming out almost as rough as Vivvie’s, “I have.”

I thought of my grandfather—of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was something wrong with him, and knowing that if I told anyone, I would be betraying him in the worst possible way. The weight of that had been a constant: there when I woke up in the morning and there when I went to bed at night. There with every breath.

I swallowed. “The worst part was knowing that it wouldn’t stay a secret forever.” I was generally better at listening than I was at talking, but I thought that maybe, if I let myself show weakness, she’d show me hers. “I knew that everything would come out eventually, but I thought if I just fought hard enough . . .”

Vivvie stopped walking. “What if that wasn’t the problem?” she asked, a desperate note in her voice. I could feel her hurtling toward the point of no return, the words pouring out of her mouth. “What if the problem was that the thing you knew would stay secret? Forever. No one would ever know. Not unless you told them.”

Vivvie knows something. That much was clear. And whatever it is—it’s killing her.

“Tell me,” I said. “You need to tell someone, so tell me.”

Vivvie went very still. I could see her thinking, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.

I didn’t let her say it. “You can tell me, Vivvie. Haven’t you heard? I’m Tess Kendrick. Worker of miracles. Resident Hardwicke fixer.”

I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t want to be any of those things. But this was Vivvie, who’d offered to cheer me up by recapping her favorite romance novel (and/or horror movie), and she was crumbling in front of me.

“I can’t.” Vivvie sucked in a breath of air.

“It’s about your father, isn’t it?”

Vivvie couldn’t bring herself to tell me her secret. That didn’t mean I couldn’t guess.

“You know something about your father,” I said, making it a statement instead of a question. “Something about your father and Theo Marquette.” Vivvie had broken down at the wake. She hadn’t been back to school since the day we saw the announcement about Justice Marquette’s death on the news.

As far as guesses went, it was an educated one.

“Maybe you think it was your dad’s fault,” I continued. Now I was just stabbing in the dark. “He was the justice’s doctor. His surgeon. And Justice Marquette died from complications with surgery.”