The Fixer (The Fixer #1)(87)

Now that the cards were on the table, I saw how easily this could go either way. William Keyes might not give me what I wanted. Adam might not even be my father.

I needed this to work.

Ivy needed for this to work.

“When were you born?” Keyes issued the question like a demand. Those four words—and the laser-sharp focus with which he assessed my features—told me that he wasn’t dismissing my claims outright.

I can do this. I have to do this.

I told him when I was born, and then where. I told him, again, what Ivy had told me: my father was young and recently enlisted.

“Adam joined the military after college.” William’s grip on the back of the chair relaxed slightly. “He met your sister when he was home on leave. She’d just turned twenty.”

I felt like a balloon that had been scratched with a knife. There was one moment of tightness in my chest, like I might explode, and then I felt the fight drain out of me. This was supposed to be my Hail Mary pass.

This was supposed to be me saving Ivy.

Adam met Ivy after I was born. As I forced myself to process that fact, I realized that I hadn’t just thought Adam was my father, I hadn’t just believed it—I’d wanted it to be true.

If Keyes was telling me the truth, Adam couldn’t be my father. I wasn’t anything to him but Ivy’s daughter.

I stood up and turned sharply to the door.

“I suggest you sit back down.”

I stopped in my tracks but didn’t sit.

“Tess, isn’t it?” the older man said, coming around to stand in front of me. “Is that short for Tessa?”

I wondered what game he was playing.

“Theresa,” I said finally.

Keyes studied me, eyes sharp. “My late wife’s name was Theresa.”

The game had changed—but I wasn’t sure how.

“I never quite figured out how Adam and Ivy met,” William Keyes continued. “She was at Georgetown. He went to see her. I’ve wondered, over the years, if there was something romantic between them.” He paused. “I see now that there’s not. That there couldn’t be.”

He walked over to a shelf on the opposite side of the room and returned with a picture. In it were two young boys. The older one had a serious expression on his face. Adam. The younger boy—he had dark hair, a shade too light to be black. He was laughing, smiling.

His eyes were hazel, a familiar mix of brown and green.

“You look like him,” William Keyes said. I had no idea what he was feeling. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the picture—away from the boy.

“Adam said he had a brother,” I said slowly. The memory washed over me. “The first time we met, Adam said he had a brother.”

He’d said that his brother had never cared for school, that he had preferred to spend his time outside.

Like me.

“You know what I think, Tess?” Keyes said, putting the picture down. “I think that my youngest met Ivy during basic training. I think they were young and stupid and, if we want to be generous, maybe even in love. Tommy was like that. If he fell, he fell hard.”

Was, I thought dully. Tommy was like that. The past tense hit me with an almost physical force.

“I told him not to enlist. I told him to go to college. He could have been an officer—but he didn’t listen.” Keyes ran a hand roughly through his hair. “Adam thinks I pushed Tommy away, pushed him into joining up by forbidding him to go. Tommy died. I lost both sons.” The kingmaker’s sentences got shorter and curter. “And then there was Ivy.”

Adam’s father—Tommy’s father—began to pace. I watched him, hyperaware in that moment that it was almost like watching myself. I’d looked at Adam, wondering if there was any of him in me, and now I knew.

It wasn’t Adam.

It was never Adam.

“Adam must have known Tommy was seeing someone,” Keyes continued, his voice raising a decibel or two as he paced. “And somehow, he found out about you.”

Me. The pieces fell into place in my mind. All of those times I’d felt like Adam was looking at me like I reminded him of someone—I’d assumed I reminded him of Ivy.

But what if I was wrong?

What if, when he yelled at me, when he told me that family didn’t bolt just because things were hard—what if those had been the times when I’d reminded him of his brother?

His dead brother. I’d lost so much in the past few weeks: Gramps, my home, my identity, who I thought my parents were, Ivy. I’d read a poem once in English class, about what it meant to master the art of losing.

I was an artist.

And now—now I would never know my father. I would never get to meet him, never know if he would have looked at me and seen pieces of himself, if he would have wanted me.

If I could have been a daughter he would have loved.

I couldn’t stay here. I started for the door with no plans of what I would do when I walked out. I’d gambled and I’d failed, and now I really was going to be an orphan. Tommy was dead, and Ivy—

Kostas is going to kill her.

I tried.

“Hold it right there, young lady.” Keyes barked out as my hand closed around the doorknob.

“Why?” I asked, whirling around, caught between sorrow and a smoldering anger I wasn’t sure would ever go away. “If it was Adam, I had something to offer. But my father is dead. Dead men don’t win elections.”