“So this is what?” I asked. “Payback?”

The muscles in Adam’s neck tensed. “This was a warning shot,” Adam corrected tersely. “My father collects things: information, people, blackmail material. He wants Ivy to remember what he’s capable of.”

Bodie had insisted that Ivy had cleared William Keyes of involvement in the justice’s murder, but—

Keyes wants Pierce to get the nomination. He organized the retreat where Pierce and Major Bharani met.

“Ivy will take care of it,” Adam told me for a second time. His eyes darkened as he pulled out onto the road. “And I’ll take care of my father.”

CHAPTER 45

Ivy arrived home that night. I’d just gotten out of the shower when she knocked on my door. Running a towel over my hair, then tossing it aside, I answered the knock.

From the look on Ivy’s face, I had a pretty good idea what she wanted to talk about.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You want to chat about my little adventure this afternoon?”

Ivy inclined her head slightly. “Can I come in?”

I stepped back from the doorway. “Knock yourself out.” I combed my fingers through my wet hair, working out kinks as I went.

“Here,” Ivy said, sitting down on my bed. “Let me.”

At first, I had no idea what she was talking about, and then she picked a brush up off my nightstand.

Ivy sits on the edge of my bed. I sit on the floor in front of her. The memory hit me just as hard this time as it had the last. Ivy murmuring softly to me. Ivy’s fingers deftly working their way through my hair.

“You used to braid my hair.” I hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

Emotion danced around the edges of Ivy’s features. “Mom preferred pigtails,” she said. “High on your head.” She shook her head slightly, a soft smile coming over her face. “Even when you were tiny, you’d never met a pair of pigtails you couldn’t demolish. A braid was a little sturdier.”

“You stayed with me,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “After the funeral, you stayed with me.”

“For a few weeks,” Ivy replied, her voice difficult to read. “Then Gramps came, and . . .”

And she’d given me away. I couldn’t blame twenty-one-year-old Ivy for that—and I wouldn’t have given up the years I’d had with Gramps, not for anything.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “About the clinical trial.”

My throat went dry, just saying the words. It was easier, in a twisted way, to think about murder and politics and what Vivvie and Henry were going through than to think about my own situation.

About Gramps.

“If the results are promising . . .” I trailed off, thinking of John Thomas Wilcox, rattling off the stages of my grandfather’s illness, the losses—one after another—we’d be facing down the road. “Maybe it’s a good idea.”

“Maybe it is,” Ivy returned. She studied me for a moment, then continued.

“I know this is hard for you. If you ever want to talk—”

“I don’t,” I said. The words came out more abruptly than I meant for them to, so I softened them slightly. “I’m not much of a talker.”

Ivy accepted that with a nod. The two of us fell into silence, then she gestured to the floor in front of her with the brush. “Sit.”

I sat. She began gently working the brush through my hair. For a minute, maybe two, she said nothing as she brushed. “I’m sorry about this afternoon. Bodie and Adam said you handled it well.”

“Is Bodie okay?”

“I took care of it.” That was all Ivy said. How she’d taken care of it, what precisely the situation had been—she clearly wasn’t in a detail-sharing mood.

“I heard Georgia ambushed you at school,” Ivy said. She kept brushing as she changed topics. “I’m sorry about that, too. It won’t happen again.”

Based on the tone in Ivy’s voice, I was guessing that she had already had or would soon be having a rather pointed conversation with the First Lady.

“She asked what you were doing in Arizona,” I told my sister. “She seemed to think that William Keyes might take exception to your digging into Pierce.”

Given what had happened after school, I expected that to provoke some sort of response in Ivy, but she just continued working the tangles out of my hair.

“You haven’t told the First Lady that Justice Marquette was murdered.” I laid that out on the table. “I’m betting that means you still haven’t told the president, either.”

“I have my reasons,” Ivy replied. The rhythm of her brushing never changed.

“Bodie said you don’t suspect the president.”

Ivy paused in her brushing, just for an instant. Then she caught herself and resumed. “The president has nothing to do with this,” she said. “That’s not why I’ve kept it quiet, Tess.”

“And William Keyes?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“He had Bodie dragged in for questioning on who knows what kind of crime, just to prove he could! Adam said that was just a warning shot—”

“You don’t need to worry about William Keyes,” Ivy told me. “I can handle it.”

“He wants Pierce nominated.” I let those words hang in the air. “He wants him to get the nomination badly enough that he’s willing to have Bodie arrested to scare you into compliance.”

“Bodie wasn’t arrested.” Ivy’s voice was maddeningly calm. “He was just taken in for questioning. And I’m not scared.”

The only way this plan makes any sense—the only way it could even potentially be worth the risk—is if Pierce had reason to believe he’d get the nomination. Henry’s words came back to dog me for the hundredth time.

“He’s good at getting what he wants, isn’t he?” I asked Ivy. “Adam’s father?”

“I’m better.”

That wasn’t what I’d been asking. “How many people, other than the president, have enough power to sway a Supreme Court nomination?”

That question took Ivy by surprise. She was quiet long enough that I wasn’t sure she was going to reply. “Men like William Keyes,” she said finally, “they’re called kingmakers. They have money. They have power. For any variety of reasons, they’re not viable political candidates themselves, but when it comes to elections, they can sway things one way or another.”