“Tess, darling, it’s over.” The First Lady rested her hand lightly on the president’s shoulder. The president winced.
“Your shoulder,” I said softly. Like Henry, the president had been shot in the shoulder.
A muscle in the president’s jaw tensed slightly, but he didn’t allow himself to close his eyes. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m fine—grateful for my life. I’m ready to heal and to lead this country as they do the same.”
“The bullet,” the First Lady said softly, trailing her hand lightly over her husband’s stitches, “did less damage than the fall.”
“Apparently,” the president joked, taking his wife’s hand in his own, “my head is not as hard as I’ve been led to believe.”
There was something intimate in the exchange between the two of them, something that made it easy to see how America had fallen in love with this first couple on the election trail.
Ivy put a hand on my shoulder. “We should go,” she said.
President Nolan turned his attention back to Ivy, back to me. “Get some rest,” he ordered. “And this time, Tess?” He smiled. “Try to stay out of trouble.”
CHAPTER 67
Hot water beat against my body. I closed my eyes and stepped farther into the spray. This shower was the only thing standing between me and Ivy.
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.