The Fixer (2 page)

Not anymore.

Ivy’s been asking questions.
I escaped to the second floor but couldn’t get away from the certainty bubbling up inside me.
She knows.

“Enjoy your shower,” Ivy called after me. “Then we’ll talk.”

She was like a broken record. And she
knew
. I’d tried so hard to keep this secret, to take care of my grandfather, to do this one thing for the man who’d done everything for me, and now . . .

I wasn’t sure exactly what Ivy did in Washington. I didn’t know for a fact that she still lived there. I couldn’t have told you if she was single or dating someone—she might have even been married. What I
did
know—what I was trying very hard
not
to know—was that if Ivy had deigned to fly out to Montana and grace the ranch with her presence, she’d done so for a reason.

My sister was a mover, a shaker, a problem solver—and right now, the problem she’d set her sights on solving was
me
.

CHAPTER 3

I gave myself three minutes to shower. I couldn’t afford to leave Ivy alone with Gramps for longer than that. I shouldn’t have left them alone at all, but I needed a moment. I needed to think.

I hadn’t seen Ivy in nearly three years. She used to make it out to the ranch every few months. The last time she’d come to visit, she’d asked me if I wanted to move to DC and live with her. At thirteen, I’d worshipped the ground my sister walked on. I’d said yes. We’d had plans. And then she’d left. Without any explanation. Without taking me with her.

Without saying good-bye.

She hadn’t been back since.
If I can convince her that Gramps and I are okay, she’ll leave again.
That should have been comforting. It should have been my glimmer of hope.

I wasn’t thirteen anymore. It shouldn’t have hurt.

I tossed on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and towel-dried my devil-may-care, too-thick hair. Ivy and I were bookend brunettes,
my hair a shade too light to be considered black and my sister’s a fraction too dark to be blond.

She met me at the bottom of the stairs. “You ready to talk?” Her voice sounded like mine. She spoke faster, but the pitch was the same.

I felt a familiar rush of anger. “Did you ever think that maybe I don’t want to talk to you?”

Ivy’s mask of pleasantness faltered, just for a second. “I got that general sense when you didn’t return my last three phone calls,” she said softly.

Christmas. My birthday. Ivy’s birthday. My sister called home exactly three times a year. I’d stopped picking up at approximately the same time that my grandfather had started forgetting little things like keys and names and turning off the stove.

Gramps.
I willed myself to concentrate on what mattered here.
There’s a situation. It’s my job to get it under control
. I rounded the corner into the kitchen, unsure of what I would find.

“ ’Bout time, Bear.” My grandfather greeted me with a ruffle of my hair and a cuff to the shoulder.

He knows me
. Relief washed over my body.
Bear
had been his nickname for me for as long as I could remember.

“Look who’s finally come to visit,” Gramps said, nodding toward Ivy. His voice was gruff, but his hazel eyes were sparkling.

This is good
, I thought.
I can work with this.
I’d been covering for my grandfather’s lapses for the past year. More frequently now than a year ago.

More frequently now than a month ago.

But if today was a good day, Ivy didn’t have to know that. If there was one thing experience had taught me, it was that she wouldn’t stick around to find out.

“I know, Gramps,” I said, taking a seat at the rickety wooden table that had been falling apart in my grandfather’s kitchen for longer than I’d been alive. “I can’t believe we actually merited an in-person Ivy checkup.”

My sister’s dark brown eyes locked on to mine.

“Ivy? Who’s Ivy?” My grandfather gave Ivy a conspiratorial grin before turning back to me. “You got an imaginary friend there, Bear?”

My heart skipped a beat. I could do this. I
had
to do this. For Gramps.

“I don’t know,” I replied, my fingers digging into the underside of my chair. “Is ‘imaginary friend’ what they’re calling perpetually absent siblings these days?”

“You’re the one who stopped returning my calls,” Ivy cut in.

Good
. Let her focus on me. Let her get mad at
me
. Anything to keep her from realizing that whatever she’d managed to glean from talking to my guidance counselor and the ranch hands—it wasn’t even the half of it. Nobody knew how bad things were.

Nobody but me.

“I didn’t return your calls because I didn’t feel like talking,” I told Ivy through gritted teeth. “You can’t just check out of our lives and then expect me to drop everything when you finally decide to pick up a phone.”

“That’s not what happened, Tessie, and you know it.”

Getting a rise out of Ivy felt better than it should have. “It’s Tess.”

“Actually,” she snapped back, “it’s Theresa.”

“For goodness’ sakes, Nora,” my grandfather cut in. “She’s only here for two weeks each summer. Don’t get your panties in a twist over a few missed calls.”

Ivy’s face went from frustrated to gutted in two seconds flat. Nora was our mother’s name. I barely remembered her, but Ivy was twenty-one when our parents died. The age difference between the two of us always felt massive, but the fact that Ivy had spent seventeen more years with Mom and Dad—that was truly the great divide. To me, the ranch was home, and our grandfather was the only real parent I’d ever known. To Ivy, he was just the grandpa she’d spent two weeks with every summer growing up.

It occurred to me, then, that when she was little, he might have called her
Bear
, too.

He thinks I’m Ivy, and he thinks Ivy is Mom
. There was no covering for this, no barbed comment I could toss out that would make Ivy brush it off. For the longest time, she just sat there, staring at Gramps. Then she blinked, and when her eyes opened again, it was like none of it had ever happened, like she was a robot who’d just rebooted to avoid running a program called “excess emotion.”

“Harry,” she said, addressing our grandfather by his first name. “I’m Ivy. Your granddaughter. This is Tess.”

“I know who she is,” he grunted. I tried not to see the uncertainty in his eyes.

“You do,” Ivy replied, her voice soothing but no-nonsense. “And you also know that she can’t stay here. You can’t stay here.”

“Like hell we can’t!” I bolted to my feet.

My grandfather slammed his palm into the table. “Language, Theresa!”

Just like that, I was me again, if only for the moment.

“Give us a minute, Tess,” Ivy ordered.

“Go on, Bear.” My grandfather looked old suddenly—and very, very tired. In that instant, I would have done anything he asked. I would have done anything to have him back.

I left them alone in the kitchen. In the living room, I paced as the minutes ticked by.
Five. Ten. Fifteen.
Around the furniture, in little figure eights, from one side of the room to the other.

“You used to do that when you were little.” Ivy appeared in the doorway, hovering there for a moment before taking a seat on the couch. “You’d do loops around Mom’s feet, the coffee table. Other babies learned to walk. You learned to pace.” She smiled slightly. “It drove her nuts.”

Ivy and I had only lived in the same house for that one year, when I was a baby and she was a senior in high school. I wished sometimes that I could remember it, but even if I could, she’d still be a stranger—one who threatened everything I’d worked so hard to protect.

“You should have called me when things got bad, Tess.”

Called her?
I should have picked up a phone and
called her
, when she couldn’t even be bothered to visit?

“I’m handling it, Ivy.” I cursed myself, cursed the guidance counselor for making the call. “We’re fine.”

“No, sweetie, you’re not.”

She didn’t get to come here, after
years
, and tell me I wasn’t fine. She didn’t get to insert herself into our lives, and she didn’t get to call me
sweetie
.

“There’s a treatment center in Boston,” she continued calmly. “The best in the country. There’s a waiting list for the inpatient facility, but I made some calls.”

My stomach twisted sharply. Gramps loved this ranch. He
was
this ranch. It wouldn’t survive without him. I’d given up everything—track, friends, the hope of ever getting a good night’s sleep—to keep him here, to keep things running, to take care of him, the way he’d always taken care of me.

“Gramps is fine.” I set my jaw in a mutinous line. “He gets confused sometimes, but he’s
fine
.”

“He needs a doctor, Tessie.”

“So take him to a doctor.” I swallowed hard, feeling like I’d already lost. “Figure out what we need to do, what
I
need to do, and then bring him
home
.”

“You can’t stay here, Tess.” Ivy reached for my hand. I jerked it back. “You’ve been taking care of him,” she continued softly. “Who’s been taking care of you?”

“I can take care of myself.”

The set of her jaw matched my own. “You shouldn’t have to.”

“She’s right, Bear.” I looked up to see Gramps standing in the doorway. “Don’t you worry about me, girlie,” he ordered. He was lucid—and intractable.

“You don’t have to do this, Gramps,” I told him. My words fell on deaf ears.

“You’re a good girl, Tess,” he said gruffly. He met my sister’s eyes and something passed unspoken between them. After a long moment, Ivy turned back to me.

“Until we get things settled, I want you to come back with me.” She held up a hand to cut off my objections. “I’ve talked to a school in DC. You start on Monday.”

CHAPTER 4

“I’d tell you that you can’t stay mad forever,” Ivy commented, “but I’m pretty sure you’d take that as a challenge.”

I hadn’t spoken to my sister once since we’d checked my grandfather into the facility in Boston. She kept telling me how nice it was, how highly thought of the specialists were, how often we could go to visit. None of that changed the fact that we left him there.
I
left him. He would wake up in the middle of the night, disoriented, and I wouldn’t be there. He would frantically start looking for the grandmother who’d died before I was even born, and I wouldn’t be there.

He would have good days, and I wouldn’t be there.

If the silent treatment was getting to Ivy, she showed no sign of it as we navigated the DC airport. Her heels clicked against the tile as she stepped off the escalator and glided into the kind of graceful power walk that made everyone else in the airport look twice and get out of her way. She paused for an instant when we came to a row of men in black
suits holding carefully lettered signs.
Chauffeurs.
At the very end of the line was a man wearing a navy blue T-shirt and ripped jeans.

There was a hint of stubble on his suntanned face and a pack of cigarettes in his left hand. In his right hand he, too, held a carefully lettered sign. But instead of writing his client’s last name, he’d opted for:
PAIN IN THE *%$&@.

Ivy stalked up to him and handed him her carry-on. “Cute.”

He smirked. “I thought so.”

She rolled her eyes. “Tess, meet Bodie. He
was
my driver and personal assistant, but as of five seconds ago, he’s fired.”

“I prefer ‘Jack-of-All-Trades,’ ” Bodie interjected. “And I’m only fired until there’s a female you can’t sweet-talk or a law you won’t br—”

Ivy cut him off with an all-powerful glare. I mentally finished his sentence:
I’m only fired until there’s a female you can’t sweet-talk or a law you won’t
break. I darted a glance at Ivy, my eyebrows shooting up. What exactly did my sister do that she needed a chauffeur willing to break laws on her behalf?

Ivy ignored my raised brows and plowed on, unperturbed. “Now would be a good time to get our bags,” she told Bodie.

“You can get your own bags, princess,” Bodie retorted. “I’m fired.” He rocked back on his heels. “I will, however, help Tess here with hers out of the goodness of my heart.” Bodie didn’t wink at me or smirk, but somehow, I felt as if he’d done both. “I’m very philanthropic,” he added.

I didn’t reply, but I did let him help me with my bags. The cigarettes disappeared into his back pocket the moment my duffels
came into view. Muscles bulged under his T-shirt as he grabbed a bag in each hand.

He didn’t look like anyone’s chauffeur.

Ivy’s house loomed over the pavement, boxy and tall, with twin chimneys on either side. It seemed too big for one person.

“I live on the second floor,” Ivy clarified as she, Bodie, and I made our way into the house. “I work on the first.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask Ivy what
work
entailed, but I didn’t. My sister had always been mysteriously close-lipped about her life in Washington. Asking for details now would be taken as a sign of interest.

I’m not interested.

Stepping into an enormous foyer, I concentrated on the sight in front of me: dark wood floors and massive columns gave the expanse the look of a ballroom. To my left, there was an alcove lined with bay windows, and behind that, a hallway lined with doors.

“The closed doors go to the conference room and my office. Both are off-limits. The main kitchen is through there, but we mostly use it for entertaining.”

We?
I wondered. I didn’t let myself get further than that as I followed Ivy up a spiral staircase to what appeared to be a sparsely decorated apartment. “The kitchen up here is more of a kitchenette,” she told me. “I don’t cook much. We mostly order in.”

Bodie cleared his throat and when she didn’t respond the first time, he repeated the action, only louder.

“We mostly order in, and sometimes Bodie makes pancakes downstairs,” Ivy amended. I took that to mean that Bodie was definitely part of Ivy’s
we
.