The Long Game (The Fixer #2)(33)

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Vivvie peered at me. “Does that mean that you’re actually okay, or that you’re stoically projecting that you will be okay at some undefined point in the future?”

I bit back a smile. Vivvie was Vivvie, no matter the circumstances. “Probably the second one,” I admitted.

“You do stoic well,” Vivvie told me. “Does Stoic Tess want to talk about it or not want to talk about it?” After a second or two, she answered her own question. “Not talk about it,” she said, translating the expression on my face. “I can do that.” She paused. “Just to clarify, does it include the attack on the president? Or just . . .”

She didn’t say John Thomas’s name.

“Ivy’s out there right now, doing who knows what,” I said. Not thinking—and not talking—about the attack on the president wasn’t an option. I could only suppress so much. “She got a call from the First Lady,” I continued.

Vivvie’s eyes widened. “Did she say—”

“Ivy didn’t say what Georgia wanted. She didn’t say anything about who they think is responsible for shooting the president.”

Senza Nome. The name Priya had given the terrorist group echoed in my head, followed on its heels by Daniela Nicolae’s ominous words. The time for waiting is over.

We’d thought the video Daniela Nicolae had made was about the hospital bombing. We thought that she had failed in her mission.

Maybe we’d thought wrong.

“You’ve got that look on your face,” Vivvie told me. “The one you get when you’re thinking about something you probably shouldn’t be thinking about.”

Vivvie’s aunt had sent her out of the room before she’d passed on the message about Senza Nome. Whether I liked it or not, the less Vivvie knew, the safer she was.

On some level, I recognized that my reasoning sounded exactly like Ivy’s.

“Henry and I were talking the other day.” I felt like I needed to tell Vivvie something true, even if it wasn’t the truth I most wanted to share. “About the way that things like this hit us harder than they hit other people because of what we’ve already lost.” I paused, searching Vivvie’s dark brown eyes the way she’d searched mine earlier. “Are you okay?”

“I should be,” Vivvie offered with an uneven smile that wavered as she spoke. “I didn’t like John Thomas. I didn’t see it happen, like you did. And it’s not like I actually knew the president, but . . .” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “My dad was President Nolan’s doctor. He saw him every day, and I just keep thinking . . .” Vivvie’s voice got softer the more she spoke. “I just keep thinking that if my dad were alive, if he’d never gotten involved with the conspiracy, never done what he did to Justice Marquette—my dad would be there, with the president, working to save his life.”

Vivvie looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “And then,” she continued, “I think about how if my dad were here, I’d make dinner and put it in the refrigerator so he’d have something to eat when he got home. And I think about the fact that if my dad were here, he’d be worried about me. He’d be in doctor mode one minute and dad mode the next, and he’d call me when he could and tell me that it was normal to feel grief when someone you know is killed, even if you didn’t like the person. He’d tell me that it was okay to be scared that something like that could happen at my school, and he’d tell me not to worry.” Vivvie pressed her eyes closed, and I knew that she was counting on her eyelids to hold back tears. “He’d tell me that he would never let anything bad happen to me.”

My heart twisted as she whispered those words. Vivvie was the one who’d discovered her father’s involvement in Justice Marquette’s death. When he’d found out that she knew his secret, he’d hit her.

“You miss him,” I said softly.

“I shouldn’t.” Vivvie was vehement. “I know what he was. I know what he did. I shouldn’t miss him.”

I tried to catch her gaze but failed. “He was your dad.”

Vivvie wrapped her arms around me in a strangling-tight hug. We stayed like that until she pulled back.

“So,” Vivvie said, wiping a tear roughly off her face with the back of her hand. “We’ve established that you’re not okay and that I’m not okay. Would it be weird to suggest we could be not-okay while baking cookies?”

I pushed back against the memories and buried the secrets as far in my psyche as they would go. “Cookies it is.”





CHAPTER 30

I woke up in the middle of the night. On the other side of my queen-size bed, Vivvie was out like a light. Restless and unable to even think about going back to sleep, I slipped out of bed and made my way to the door. I kept thinking about John Thomas. About his blood on my hands. About his final words.

Tell, he’d wheezed. Didn’t. And then: Tell.

What had John Thomas been trying to say?

Was he asking me to tell someone that he didn’t do something? Or was he saying that he hadn’t told?

Told what? I paced as I thought. The light wasn’t on in the living room, so it took me a moment to realize that Ivy was sitting on the sofa.