The Fixer

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.”

Dead men fathering illegitimate children was barely even news.

My father is dead. It hurt. All I’d ever seen of him was a picture, and it hurt. Ivy might die. I hadn’t saved her.

Just this once, I wanted to save someone.

“No matter what Ivy and my son might have told you”—Keyes crossed the room to stand in front of me—“I’m not so heartless as to send my only grandchild away.”

His grandchild. There was something in the way he said that word that was almost manic, as if my importance were larger than life.

My heart clenched.

“You’ll do it?” I asked, terrified to hope for even a second that the answer might be yes. “You’ll get the pardon?”

You’ll save Ivy?

William Keyes—my paternal grandfather—put a hand under my chin. He tilted my face toward his. “That depends,” he said, “on whether or not you’ll do something for me.”

CHAPTER 63

Back at Vivvie’s place, I told the others about the deal I’d struck, and I waited. Eventually, Asher got a text from his sister. Without a word, he flipped on the news.

On the television, a pretty Asian American reporter stared directly into the camera, her hair whipping in the wind. “Again, I am standing outside the Washington Monument, where a SWAT team is closing in on what we are told is a hostage situation.” The camera panned to show a blockade—and beyond that, two dozen men, armed to the teeth.

“Ivy,” I whispered. She had to be okay. She had to be. You have to get through this, I thought fiercely. You have to, Ivy. I’ll never forgive you if you don’t.

I couldn’t look away from the screen, the armed men.

Henry sat down beside me. “I would venture to guess that Kostas decided to make it harder for the president to ignore his demands,” he said.

Ivy had promised Kostas that she would tell him exactly how to handle this situation. I wondered if she’d been the one to suggest taking the situation public.

I will hate you forever if you leave me now, Ivy, I thought, wishing she could hear me. My eyes were dry. So was my throat. I had nothing left but the words repeating themselves over and over again in my head. I’d done everything right. I’d fixed this. Help was coming.

She didn’t get to leave me again.

On-screen, the reporter kept throwing information at us. The Washington Monument had been closed for construction. No one was sure how many people were inside, but there was a bomb.

The bomb strapped to Ivy’s chest.

I looked at the clock on the wall, like it could tell me when the deal I’d struck with Keyes would come through. Even for a man known for making things happen, conjuring a governor’s pardon out of nowhere took time.

Time Ivy might not have.

“We don’t have to watch.” Vivvie reached for the remote. I pulled it back.

“Yes,” I said simply, “we do.”

The four of us sat, one next to the other, our eyes locked on the screen. Vivvie’s hand worked its way into mine. On my other side, Henry surprised me by doing the same.