The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(71)

What?

On the other end of the line, Adam must have asked a similar question, because Ivy responded.

“Yes, I’m sure, Adam.” She paused, listening, and then spoke again. “Indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely?” I overcame my inability to form coherent words. “What do you mean, indefinitely? Why is Adam packing me a bag?”

Ivy didn’t answer. I turned my attention to Bodie.

“What is Reagan National?”

Bodie met my eyes briefly in the mirror. “Airport,” he answered.

Airport. Bag.

“I’m not going,” I said, feeling a ball of panic slowly unfurling inside me. “I’m not going anywhere. Ivy!”

She wasn’t listening to me. As soon as she got off the phone with Adam, she placed another call. “Stetson,” she said, a smile in her voice that I knew, without being able to see her, was not reflected on her face. “Ivy Kendrick. I need a favor.”

It soon became clear that when Ivy said I need a favor, what she really meant was I need a plane.

Less than an hour after she’d removed me from the White House, she was putting me on that plane. Standing on a private airstrip, being ordered onto a private plane, I didn’t have time to wonder when, exactly, I’d become a girl who wore ball gowns and had access to jets.

“Ivy,” I said for probably the fortieth time. “What is going on?”

This time, she answered. “What’s going on,” she said, her voice cutting through the wind around us like a red-hot knife through butter, “is that Carson Dweck was murdered this afternoon.”

Less than twenty-four hours after talking to Henry and me.

“What’s going on,” Ivy continued, “is that I have every reason to believe the person who killed him was there tonight.” Ivy’s gaze was focused entirely on me, with an intensity that scared me. “What’s going on is that I came to the White House to fill the president in on the situation, and I found you. What’s going on, Tess, is that you have drawn an enormous target on your own forehead, and I am getting you out of here.” She glanced back at her driver. “Bodie will go with you.”

Bodie gave a brief nod in response.

“You’re sending me away.” That wasn’t a question. I wasn’t sure why I’d said the words out loud. My chest was tight, each breath hard-won. “Ivy, I didn’t mean to—”

Ivy took a step forward, closing what little space there was between us. “Right now, I don’t care what you meant to do, Tess. I asked you to do one thing. I asked you to keep your mouth shut.” Her lips trembled slightly, then pulled back to reveal her teeth. “I asked you to trust me.” She turned her head, like she couldn’t stand to look at me. “Maybe I should have known that was asking too much.”

I felt like she’d knocked the breath out of me.

“Ivy, I—”

“Give me your phone.” She wasn’t going to listen to me. She’d shut down. She was shutting me out.

I handed it to her. She popped the battery out, dropped the phone onto the tarmac, and crushed it underneath her heel.

“Ivy.”

Ivy stared at the crushed phone for a moment, then looked back up. “You won’t need this,” she said. She turned to Adam. “You have her bag?”

Adam held it out to me. I stood with my hands to my side. If I didn’t take it, this wasn’t real.

“You can go with your things,” Ivy told me calmly, “or you can go with nothing but the clothes on your back, but I swear to you, Tess, you are getting on that plane if I have to order a sedative and knock you unconscious.”

Adam put a hand on Ivy’s shoulder. She took in a ragged breath. I looked over at Bodie, who was standing a few feet away.

“Get on the plane, kid,” he said gently.

“You can’t do this,” I said. I was talking to Bodie and to Ivy and to Adam, who hadn’t said a word since he’d gotten here.

“I can,” Ivy said, “and I am.” For a second, I thought she’d leave it there, but she didn’t. “I’m the adult here. I make the decisions. You’re the kid.” She brought her hand gingerly to my cheek. “You’re my kid.”

“Ivy.” That was all Adam said—just her name—but she responded like he’d said something else.

“No, Adam. If she’s never going to trust me, if she’s set on hating me forever, she might as well hate me for the right reason.”

I don’t hate—

I couldn’t even finish the thought, because suddenly, Ivy was talking again, and it was very hard to breathe.

“You’re my kid.” She repeated the words. “Mine, Tess.”

I told myself that she meant that I was her responsibility now.

“I’m not your sister.” Those words were harder to misunderstand. “I was never your sister.”

I don’t understand.

I don’t want to.

“I was seventeen.” Ivy’s arms encircled her waist. “He was young, too, recently enlisted. It was the first, last, and only time I’d ever really let go. And then, when I found out . . .”

Found out. Found out. Found out. The words echoed in my mind.

“I was your age, Tess. I was a kid, so when Mom and Dad decided that the best thing would be for them to raise you, I said yes.” She repeated herself then. “I said yes.”