The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(3)

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, 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.”