There was no one left to bring to justice—and no one left to tell the story, except for Henry and Asher and Vivvie and me. The White House wanted this kept quiet.
With the guilty parties dead, I wasn’t saying a word—for Vivvie’s sake, if not my own. Something in my gut told me that Henry would do the same. He would bury this, push it into the recesses of his mind where he kept the secrets that hurt him most. The ones with the potential to hurt the people he loved.
I wondered if he’d hate Ivy for this, too.
I wondered if Ivy had ever really been the one he was mad at.
Ivy’s fine. That was the refrain I repeated to myself, over and over again. She’s fine. She’s fine. She’s coming home. But no matter how many times I told myself that, I could never be more than ninety percent sure, until the moment the door to Adam’s apartment opened and I saw Ivy standing on the other side.
They must have let her wash up at some point, because she looked as polished as she had the day she came for me at the ranch. Her light brown hair was pulled into a loose French braid at the nape of her neck.
She walked like she had somewhere to be.
I stood, frozen in place. Ivy stopped a few feet away from me. I was still so angry with her. I’d been so scared. I’d spent years telling myself that she didn’t matter, that she couldn’t hurt me unless I let her, that we were nothing alike. But the past twenty-four hours had washed all of that away.
She was in me. She was under my skin, and there in my smile and the shape of my face, and she would always matter. She would always be able to hurt me, and there was nothing I could do, no space I could put between us to erase that.
She’s here. She’s okay. She’s here. The words beat out a gut-wrenching rhythm in my head. Ivy’s lips trembled slightly. She took one step toward me, then another, then another, until she was right in front of me, and something in me gave. I fell—fell against her, fell into her arms, wrapping mine tightly around her. I buried my head in her shoulder.
She was shaking—or maybe I was.
But she was solid and real and fine. I bent, my head against her chest. She breathed in the smell of my hair. I could hear her heart beating.
“Tessie.” That was all she said, my name.
I mumbled something into her shirt.
“What?” Ivy said.
I repeated myself. “It’s Tess.”
I slept in Ivy’s room that night, curled into a tiny ball beside her on the king-size bed. In the morning, I could be mad at her. I could hate her for the secrets she’d kept, the lies she’d told—but for now, for this one night, I wasn’t letting her out of my sight.
Whatever Ivy was—both in the grand scheme of things and to me—we were family. Not just in blood, not just because she was somehow responsible for half of my DNA. We were family because I would always love her more than I hated her. Because losing her would have killed me. Because I would have done anything, made a bargain with any devil, to keep her from harm’s way.
We were family because she would have walked through fire for me.
For the longest time, we lay there, neither one of us asleep, neither of us saying a word, not even touching.
I fell asleep to the rhythm of her breaths.
Sometime later, I woke. Outside, pitch-black was giving way to the first hints of morning. I was alone in Ivy’s bed. Panic shot through me, like ice through my veins, but I forced my heart not to pound, forced my feet onto the floor. I walked through the apartment, down the spiral stairs, and through the foyer, and saw a slant of light coming from the conference room.
The door was cracked open. I pushed it inward. Ivy sat in the middle of the conference table, staring at the wall. There were three pictures hanging there: Judge Pierce, Major Bharani, and Damien Kostas.
“Ivy?” I announced my presence because she was staring at the pictures so hard that I wasn’t sure she’d marked my entrance to the room. Ivy turned to look at me. She blinked twice.
“Sometimes you look like him,” she said, a soft smile playing around the edges of her lips. “Your father.”
“You loved him.”
“I did.” She slid off the table and walked toward me. “Some days, I still do.” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear. I let her.
“You’re not my mother.” I softened those words as much as I could. “I don’t know if I can . . . I don’t know what you are.”
Ivy met my eyes. “I’m yours.”