Page 74 of The Ruling Class

“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 happenedafterschool, 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.”