THE LONG GAME (33 page)

I’d risked my life.

I’d lied to her.

And we both knew that given the same circumstances, I would do it again.

Eventually, the hot water ran cold. I turned off the spray and stepped out of the shower, wrapping a towel around my body. I
slipped on an oversized T-shirt.

Ivy was waiting for me in my room. With her hair wet from her own shower, I could see the resemblance between us. She was dressed nearly identically, in an oversized USAF T-shirt—one of Adam’s.

It was two in the morning. I shouldn’t have even been vertical. And all I could think about was how different Ivy’s life might have been, if it weren’t for me.

Ivy picked
up the brush on my nightstand. She sat on the edge of the bed. I sat on the floor. Wordlessly, she began brushing my hair. As she worked her way through the tangles, I felt my throat tighten.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the headmaster. I saw Matt Benning. I saw Henry, drowning in tubes. I heard John Thomas Wilcox’s gasping last words.

I couldn’t close my eyes anymore.

I didn’t realize
that Ivy had stopped brushing until she lowered herself to the floor and sat beside me. I remembered leaning into Adam and crying into his chest. I didn’t have any tears left for Ivy.

I pulled my legs to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. It took me a few seconds to realize that beside me, Ivy had done the exact same thing.

“Did Adam give you my message?” I asked her.

I’d asked Adam
to tell Ivy that I forgave her, to tell her that I was sorry for what I’d had to do. I’d asked him to tell her that I was my mother’s daughter.

“He did,” Ivy said, the volume and tone in her voice an exact match for mine: soft and hoarse and hesitant.

Ivy and I had lost so many years together that sometimes it felt like neither one of us knew how to just
be
in the other’s presence.

“I meant
it,” I told Ivy. “I’m tired of being angry with you. I’m tired of holding on to old hurts.”

“I know I hurt you—again and again. But, Tessie, hurting you is the last thing I ever wanted to do. I never meant—”

“It’s okay,” I said.

She shook her head. “No. It’s not.”

“What you did—when I was born, when Mom and Dad died, when you left me in Montana—it’s okay.”

Twenty-four hours ago, those words
would have been unfathomable to me. But I’d walked back into Hardwicke not knowing if I would walk out. I’d
chosen
to do so, and if I could choose to do that, I could choose to change things with Ivy.

I could choose to stop expecting her to hurt me again.

“I lied to you your whole life, Tessie. I don’t expect you to forgive that.”

I straightened my legs and leaned my head onto her shoulder.
I closed my eyes. “We’re all liars sometimes,” I said.

I heard her suck in a ragged breath.

“Do you forgive me?” I asked, murmuring the words into her shoulder. “For going back in there? For lying to you? For not being the kind of daughter you want?”

Ivy took me gently by the shoulders. “You are exactly the kind of daughter I want.” A lump rose in my throat as she continued, “You always have
been.”

CHAPTER 68

The next morning, I woke up in Ivy’s bed. I watched her sleep, remembering the last time the two of us had shared a bed.
You’d just been held hostage
, I told Ivy silently.
I’d bargained for your release.
The symmetry between that situation and the one we’d found ourselves in the day before did not escape me.

Every family had their traditions.

I woke up in the middle of the night
, I continued, watching the rise and fall of Ivy’s chest.
And you were gone.
That time, Ivy had been the one who couldn’t sleep. I wondered if she’d watched me, the way I was watching her now.
I went looking for you. I found you in the conference room
.
You couldn’t stop going back over what had happened. You couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the Secret Service agent who’d held you captive
had been in the middle of surrendering when he was shot and killed.

Ivy had been convinced that wasn’t an accident. It was too neat, too clean, too convenient.

Unfortunately, the shooter resisted.
The words the president had spoken to me the day before echoed in my head.

Too neat. Too clean. Too convenient.

“Morning, Tessie.” Ivy turned over onto her side. “How did you sleep?”

I woke up thinking.
I can’t stop thinking.

“Yeah,” Ivy said softly, taking in the expression on my face and the dark circles under my eyes. “Me too.” She pushed a strand of hair out of my face. “How about I attempt to channel Bodie and make us some pancakes?”

Ivy was many things, but a good cook wasn’t one of them.

“Don’t give me that look,” Ivy said. “I’m a professional. I fix problems for a living. I’m fairly
certain I can handle some pancakes without causing our kitchen to explode.”

The kitchen didn’t explode, but the pancakes did. Ivy called Bodie to undo the damage. When he walked through the front door, he wasn’t alone.

“Look who I found lurking on the porch,” he said.

Vivvie hovered in the doorway for four or five seconds, her big brown eyes fixed on mine. Her lips trembled, and I thought of
the way we’d left things in the hallway.

You’re supposed to be my friend. My
best
friend—

Before I could finish the thought, Vivvie launched herself at me, jackrabbiting across the room and flinging her arms around me. She pressed her face into my shoulder and hugged me hard. My arms curved slowly around her.

Bodie and Ivy exchanged a glance, then made their way into the kitchen. I barely noticed.
All I could think was that the last time I’d seen Vivvie had been on the security feed. Her hands had been bound behind her back. She’d been trapped, terrified.

“I’m sorry I got mad at you!” Vivvie blurted out, pulling back to look up at me. “When everything happened, and I didn’t know where you were, and people were getting shot, and—”

“Hey.” I kept my voice soft but caught Vivvie’s attention
before she could progress to full-on babbling mode. “You had a right to be mad, Vivvie. You had a right to be upset. I knew something—something big—about what happened with your dad, and I kept it from you.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me,” Vivvie said fiercely. “I don’t want to know, Tess.” She swallowed, her thumbs worrying at the sides of her index fingers. “That’s what I realized, when I had
a gun pointed at my head. I love what we do. You and Henry and Asher and me.”

The way Vivvie said Henry’s name, wedged between mine and Asher’s, was a knife to the gut.

“I love helping you fix things,” Vivvie continued. I could hear the tears in her voice before I saw the sheen of them in her eyes. “I like making people happy and righting wrongs. I like being
us
. But I’m okay with letting someone
else handle conspiracies and terrorists and things that can get people killed. I don’t need answers.” Vivvie pressed her lips together and offered me a teary, apologetic smile. “I’m not like you, Tess. Or Henry. Answers don’t matter to me.
People
do. And if not knowing is the cost I have to pay to keep
any
of us safe—I don’t need to know.”

There was so much I couldn’t tell Vivvie—about Henry
and Senza Nome, what had really happened in that school, the fact that Daniela Nicolae was still out there, alive.

“Okay,” I told Vivvie. She was giving me permission to protect her. I loved her for that.

“I’m going to hug you again now,” Vivvie warned me. Before she could make good on the threat, the doorbell rang. Vivvie glanced out the window, then grinned. “You might want to prepare for
a group hug.”

A second later, she flung open the door, and Asher bounded in. “Did I hear someone say ‘group hug’?” he asked, throwing an arm around each of us. “What’s next on the agenda? Might I suggest either an impromptu dance party or an epic battle of pillow fight proportions?”

“No.”

The answer to Asher’s question came from behind him. I looked up and saw Emilia standing in the doorway.
For a second, as our eyes met, I saw her in the library. I saw her stepping out into the aisle. I saw her thrusting her chin out and facing Dr. Clark head-on.

“Asher’s been banned from pillow fighting.” Emilia’s voice gave no hint to whether or not her thoughts in any way mirrored mine. “Trust me,” she continued dryly, “when I say it’s a kindness to all involved.”

You gave yourself up for me.
You risked your life for me.

“What?” Emilia shot back, staring me down. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

She didn’t want a thank-you any more than she’d given me one for taking on John Thomas for her.

“I could be wrong about this,” I told Emilia, “but I’m pretty sure they call it a
group
hug for a reason.”

I saw a flicker of raw surprise cross Emilia’s features before she hid it. Asher latched
a hand onto his twin and pulled Emilia to the rest of us. Vivvie wasn’t one to question a hug, so within seconds, she had one arm wrapped around Emilia and one around me. Asher kept hold of his twin and pulled me tight.

A little too tight.

We started to topple. Asher threw his whole body into it and brought all four of us to the floor. Vivvie started giggling.

“The bat is in the belfry!” Asher
told her, falling back into code.

Emilia tried to pry herself out from underneath her brother. “We are not related,” she told him.

Asher was unperturbed. “All we need is Henry,” he declared, “and some borderline illegal fireworks, and all will be right with the world.”

This was what it would be like, I realized, as I weathered the sound of Henry’s name. This was what I’d signed up for, when
I’d decided to keep Henry’s secret—to make him keep it.

“Have you been to see him yet?” Asher asked me, propping himself up on his elbows. “The nurses didn’t want to let me in, but I can be very persuasive.” He wiggled his eyebrows.

“I saw him,” I said, my throat tightening around the words.

Asher sighed. “I still can’t believe Henry got himself shot. Even I can’t one-up that.” He sighed. “Now
I will never win the heart of Tess Kendrick through acts of derring-do!” The teasing undertone in his voice—the one that said that he wasn’t interested in my heart, but he thought that Henry was—cut into me with almost physical force.

Emilia rolled her eyes at her brother’s dramatics. “And I,” she added, “will never win the student council election.” She sighed and leaned back on the heels of
her hands. “My campaign is dead in the water. Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?”

I stared at her.

“Kidding,” Emilia clarified. “Mostly.”

Emilia’s taste in humor wasn’t the reason I was staring at her.

Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?
My mouth went dry, my heart pounding
deafeningly in my chest.
Too perfect. Too neat. Too clean.

Suddenly, I was back in my World Issues class. Dr. Clark was at the front, lecturing about flashbulb memories. She was asking what people would remember about the day that President Nolan was shot. She’d asked if they would remember Georgia Nolan’s rousing speech about her husband, the fighter. She’d asked if we would remember the record
number of voters who turned out at the polls.

Going into midterm elections, the president’s approval rating had been at an all-time low.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the outcome of the elections. But I knew, in my gut, what I would find when I pulled the information up on my phone.

Before the president had been shot, the outlook for his administration had been dire. His party almost certainly
would have lost its majority in Congress. The chances that the president would get a second term in office were next to nothing. That was
why
Congressman Wilcox had been working with Senza Nome. The revelation that Walker Nolan had impregnated a terrorist
had been
meant
to devastate the Nolan administration at the worst possible time.

And then, the day before midterm elections, the president
had been shot—and suddenly, President Nolan wasn’t seen as complicit in Walker’s ordeal. He was a victim, a soldier on the front lines of the war on terror.

Senza Nome had already gotten what they wanted.
The thought solidified in my mind.
They had no reason to shoot him. None.

I pictured the president in his hospital bed, telling me that the shooter had been connected to the terrorists. I pictured
him telling me that he was ready to heal and to lead this country as it did the same.

There were good guys, and there were bad guys, and everything was tied up with a neat little bow.

The shoulder
, I thought.
He was shot in the shoulder.

I could hear Dr. Clark, tending to Henry:
Shoulder wounds are rarely lethal.

I could hear the First Lady:
The bullet did less damage than the fall.

If the
president hadn’t fallen, if he hadn’t hit his head just right, there wouldn’t have
been
a coma. He would have been rushed to the hospital, rushed into surgery.

Do you know what heroically surviving a terrorist’s bullet does to someone’s approval rating?

“Tess?” Asher’s voice pulled me back to the present.

As I covered and picked up the conversation with the three of them, all I could think,
over and over again, was that if it wasn’t for the head injury, President Nolan would have been
fine
.

CHAPTER 69

Two days later, I got an invitation to dine at the White House. I hadn’t said a word to Ivy about my suspicions. The president was a friend. I couldn’t ask her to investigate the possibility that he’d arranged his own shooting until I was sure.

Sure that there was something to investigate.

Sure that it was worth it.

So I accepted Georgia Nolan’s invitation to brunch, and I went
to the White House, uncertain what I expected to find there.