I didn’t reply immediately. Henry stood there, perfectly comfortable with the silence, until I broke it. “Thank you,” I said. “For standing up for Vivvie.”
Henry looked distinctly uncomfortable with my thanks. “It is possible,” he admitted, his voice taut, “that I know what it is like to have your family be the featured story on Hardwicke’s gossip circuit.”
If what we suspected was true, if it got out, Henry and Vivvie wouldn’t just be the subject of gossip at Hardwicke. Their families would be front-page news.
“It is also possible,” Henry continued, his back still to me, “that I suspect you might have had something to do with Vivvie’s father’s demotion.”
Henry was connecting the dots—too much, too fast. How? “Not everything is my fault,” I told him.
“Believe it or not, that wasn’t meant as criticism.” Henry turned to face me. “My mother breakfasts at the Roosevelt Hotel.” He waited for those words to register, but they meant nothing to me. “She thought she saw Vivvie there. This morning.”
It took me a moment to read between the lines. If Henry’s mother had seen Vivvie, she’d seen Vivvie’s bruises.
“I knew something was wrong. At the wake.” Henry’s jaw tightened. “I just didn’t know what.”
He’d seen Vivvie break down. Maybe he’d noticed her absence since.
“I knew something was wrong,” he said again, “and I did nothing. I was so focused on my own grief—”
“Pretty sure that at a wake for a loved one, you’re allowed to be focused on your own grief,” I told him.
I could feel him rejecting that logic. She was a classmate. She’d needed help. He’d missed it. Henry Marquette wasn’t a forgiving person—especially of himself.
“It is possible,” Henry said, his voice still sounding oddly formal, “that I might have misjudged you, Tess.”
He knew Vivvie’s dad was abusive. He thought I’d helped her. He thought I was the reason her father was no longer the president’s doctor.
That’s not even the half of it. I couldn’t tell him. It made me angry that I wanted to. It chafed that I cared that he’d misjudged me—and, more than anything, I could feel guilt nipping at my heels, ready to devour me whole for keeping the truth from him, for forcing his best friend to keep it from him.
“It’s possible,” I told him sharply, pushing down the mess of emotions churning in my gut and pulling back from the boy who’d caused them, “that I don’t really care whether you misjudge me or not.”
CHAPTER 33
That night, Ivy left me to my own devices. It was like she thought that by avoiding me, she could somehow make me magically forget everything I already knew about Justice Marquette’s death.
Fat chance of that happening.
Hardwicke was a small school. There were fewer than a hundred kids in my entire grade. I couldn’t turn around without seeing Henry. Vivvie’s empty seat in English class the next morning was just another reminder.
I dredged my way from English to physics and from physics to Speaking of Words, trying not to think about the big questions.
Who did the second number on the disposable cell belong to?
Why hadn’t Ivy gone straight to the president with our suspicions?
“Tess.” The Speaking of Words teacher zeroed in on me within moments of the bell’s ringing. “Do you have something prepared for us?”
It was Friday. I’d been at Hardwicke for two weeks. It was probably too much to hope that the teachers would continue skipping over me indefinitely.
“Almost,” I lied through my teeth. Mr. Wesley—who was sixty if he was a day—didn’t call me on it. He just gave me a long, assessing look, then asked for a volunteer.
The assignment was an eight-to ten-minute “persuasive speech” on a controversial topic. Icelandic, never-turns-down-a-dare Di volunteered to go first, followed by a boy whose name I didn’t know, followed by Henry. The last speech of the day came from John Thomas Wilcox. He’d rigged a projector to throw pictures onto the whiteboard as he talked. His topic was stem cell research. I wasn’t paying much attention until he flashed a picture of my grandfather up on the board.
“Alzheimer’s disease is progressive, debilitating, and ultimately fatal.”
I stopped breathing and had to force myself to start again.
The picture was maybe five years old. I couldn’t tell where it was from, because John Thomas had cropped the photo close up on the face. Hazel eyes. Lips set in a firm line. My grandfather’s skin was tan and weatherworn. No one but me would have seen the softness in his expression: the warmth in his eyes, the humor dancing around the edges of that nonsmile.
“Let me tell you about this man,” John Thomas said. As he continued, each word sliced into me, like a dull knife forcibly carving up flesh.