Page 21 of The Ruling Class (The Fixer #1)

Vivvie still wasn’t at school on Monday. Henry Marquette, however, was. At lunch, he sat at Emilia’s table. His posture was straighter than the others’, his default expression more intense. Every once in a while, his gaze flickered over to mine.

He stared straight through me, every time.

“What are we doing?” Asher helped himself to a seat at my table.

“ We aren’t doing anything,” I told him bluntly.

“My mistake. I thought we were brooding in Henry’s general direction. Like so.” He adopted a stormy countenance, then gestured to me. “Yours is better.”

“Go away, Asher.”

“You say ‘go away’, I hear ‘be my bosom buddy.’ ” He gave an elaborate shrug. “Seriously, though: friendship bracelets—yea or nay?”

I wasn’t sure what game he was playing. I’d been at Hardwicke for a week, and even that was enough time to ascertain that Asher Rhodes was well liked. Popular, even.

“What do you want with me?”

Asher didn’t bat an eye at the question. “Maybe I’m tragically bored and horribly lonely and looking for love in all the wrong places.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Or maybe,” he said, leaning forward and placing his elbows on the table, “I’m tired of everyone liking me all the time and it’s liberating to be around someone with no expectations.

Or maybe you just looked like you could use a friend.

” He didn’t give me a chance to respond.

“Diet Coke?” Asher had two cans. He politely offered me one.

“No.”

“Mentos?” He held out a roll.

“Don’t Diet Coke and Mentos—”

“—explode?” Asher supplied. He opened one of the sodas. “I have a passing fondness for explosions.”

That was concerning on so many levels.

“I’m starting to see why your sister thinks you need a keeper.”

Asher rolled one of the Mentos contemplatively around the edge of the Diet Coke can. I reached over and flicked the candy at him. It pelted him in the forehead.

“I’m going to take that as a yes on the friendship bracelets,” he informed me.

Emilia had said that when Asher got bored, things got broken. Laws, standards of decency, occasionally bones. He was probably sitting here, at my table, for the same reason he’d gone up on the chapel roof.

I was interesting .

“Have you spoken to Vivvie at all?” Asher attempted to sound casual, but there was a stray note of seriousness in his tone.

“No.” I studied him for a few seconds. “Should I have?”

Asher’s eyes drifted to the table where Henry was sitting. “She kind of had a breakdown. At Theo’s wake.”

Vivvie. My gut had told me then that something was wrong—but wrong enough for her to break down?

My stomach twisted sharply. What are the chances that her father found that breakdown embarrassing?

I knew very little about Vivvie’s dad. He was a war hero.

A doctor. But I couldn’t keep from thinking about the way his face had morphed when he went from talking to Vivvie to talking to me.

I stood and picked up my tray. She hasn’t been at school for four days. Back in Montana, my guidance counselor had been concerned when I’d missed five. Total.

“You look like someone who’s about to do something highly inadvisable.” Asher caught up to me as I dumped my trash. “And God knows, if there’s something inadvisable going on, I want in.”

“Go away.”

“You say ‘go away’, I hear ‘wreak havoc by my side.’ ”

I didn’t reply. In all likelihood, Vivvie was fine . She probably had some kind of flu.

In all likelihood, the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach meant nothing.

“Tess?” Asher raised an eyebrow at me. “Anything I can do?”

I glanced at the building. Fifth period was starting soon. After a moment, I turned back to Asher. “Do you have a car?”

We found Vivvie’s address in the Hardwicke directory. Asher drove.

“Nice car,” I told him, trying to distract myself from the fact that I was skipping school to follow up a hunch I couldn’t even articulate.

“Why, thank you,” Asher replied. “It’s Emilia’s. Mine met with an unfortunate accident involving a toaster and a squirrel.”

I didn’t really know where to start. “You stole your sister’s car?”

“Is it still stealing if she loaned it to me once and I made a copy of her keys?” The question was clearly meant to be rhetorical.

“Yes,” I told him. “Definitely still stealing.”

“And so begins a life of crime,” Asher said with a morose shake of his head.

“Your sister is going to kill you,” I told him. Skipping school. Stealing her car.

Asher waved away my words, unconcerned. “If Emilia was predisposed to fratricide, I wouldn’t have made it past kindergarten,” he said. “I am, however, somewhat concerned that she might kill you .”

When we arrived at Vivvie’s house half an hour later, I got out of the car, then hesitated. I hadn’t thought this far ahead. What was I doing here? I had no plan. I wasn’t even entirely certain why I’d come.

It’s probably nothing. Vivvie’s probably fine.

I didn’t believe that, and I didn’t know why. I made my way to the front porch. Asher followed. No one answered the first time I rang the bell. Or the second. But the third time, the door opened a crack.

“Tess?” Vivvie’s voice was hoarse. Like she’d been yelling, or crying— or , I told myself, trying to be rational, like she has strep throat and that is why she hasn’t been at school.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

Vivvie looked past me and registered Asher’s presence.

“I was worried about you,” I told her. She didn’t reply. “Tell me I shouldn’t be.”

Vivvie summoned her voice. “You shouldn’t be.”

Liar . The door was open wider now. She looked like she hadn’t slept since the last time I’d seen her.

“I’m going to stretch my legs a bit and let you two ladies talk.” Asher set off on a stroll around the neighborhood, leaving Vivvie and me alone.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

Vivvie shook her head, but she also stepped back, allowing me entry.

I crossed the threshold into the foyer. For a few seconds, Vivvie looked at everything but me: the floor, the ceiling, the walls.

Eventually, her gaze found its way to mine.

The oversized sweatshirt she was wearing slipped off one shoulder.

The skin underneath was darker near her collarbone. Bruised.

She tracked my gaze to the bruise and froze.

“Did your father do that?” I asked softly.

Vivvie jerked her sweatshirt back up. She shook her head—more than once. “He’s not like that.” She still had a hold on her sweatshirt, like she couldn’t coax her hand into letting go. “It was an accident.” Now she was nodding, as if she could will that into being true.

“Okay,” I said. But we both knew that it wasn’t okay. She wasn’t okay.

“My dad and I had a fight. After the wake.” Vivvie’s grip on her sweatshirt tightened. Her free arm wrapped itself around her torso in a fierce self-hug. “The kind of fight where you yell,” she clarified. “Not the kind where you …”

Not the kind where the bigger person hits the small one , I filled in, unable to keep from thinking about that bruise.

“We were just yelling,” Vivvie reiterated fiercely. “That’s how we fight. He yells. I cry. He gets flustered because I’m crying.”

This was Vivvie talking about what a fight with her father was like. Not the fight she’d had with him after the wake.

“This time was different,” I said. I kept my voice low and stayed away from questions. Questions required answers. I was stating facts.

Vivvie slowly unwound her hand from her shirt. “This time was different,” she echoed, her voice barely more than a whisper. “He grabbed me. He didn’t mean to.” She paused. “I know what that sounds like, Tess. I do. But it’s been just the two of us for years, and he’s never …”

We were still standing in the foyer. The house was immaculate: everything in its place.

“You weren’t in school today.” I stuck to statements—nonthreatening ones—as best I could. “You weren’t in school most of last week, either.”

“I’m not hiding any more bruises,” Vivvie said quickly. She could see how this looked. “Last week, my dad and I weren’t even—we weren’t fighting. I just told him I was sick, and he let me stay home.”

She’d told him she was sick. But she wasn’t.

“You have to come back to school eventually,” I said gently. What I didn’t say was: Who or what are you avoiding?

What I didn’t say was: What were you and your father fighting about?

“I’ll come back to school tomorrow,” Vivvie told me. “I swear.” I could feel the nervous energy rolling off her. She was starting to panic about what she’d told me—even though she hadn’t said much at all.

“I need some air,” I told her. We both knew that I wasn’t the one who needed it. “You want to go for a walk?”

After a long moment, her head bobbed in something I took as a nod.

She slipped on a pair of shoes, and we started walking: out the front door, down the sidewalk, around her neighborhood.

Neither of us said a word. I could feel Vivvie trying to reel it in.

Trying to be strong. This was a girl who didn’t want to bother classmates she’d known her entire life by asking to sit at their tables for lunch.

No matter how badly she needed my help, she wouldn’t ask for it.

She couldn’t .

Matching the rhythm of my steps to hers, I willed my presence to do the talking for me. You are not a bother. You are not alone.

One block. Two. Eventually, Vivvie’s arms wrapped their way around her torso again.

“Are you okay?” I asked her. I met her eyes. “I know that’s your line. I was just trying it out.”

She managed a small smile. We fell quiet. In that silence, she must have reached a tipping point, because she was the one who spoke next.

“Have you ever known something you desperately wished you didn’t know?” Vivvie’s voice was rough in her throat, like she almost couldn’t choke out the words. We kept walking, slow and steady, as I processed the question.

She was asking me to tell her that she wasn’t alone.

“Yes,” I said, my own voice coming out almost as rough as Vivvie’s, “I have.”

I thought of my grandfather—of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was something wrong with him, and knowing that if I told anyone, I would be betraying him in the worst possible way.

The weight of that had been a constant: there when I woke up in the morning and there when I went to bed at night. There with every breath.

I swallowed. “The worst part was knowing that it wouldn’t stay a secret forever.

” I was generally better at listening than I was at talking, but I thought that maybe, if I let myself show weakness, she’d show me hers.

“I knew that everything would come out eventually, but I thought if I just fought hard enough …”

Vivvie stopped walking. “What if that wasn’t the problem?

” she asked, a desperate note in her voice.

I could feel her hurtling toward the point of no return, the words pouring out of her mouth.

“What if the problem was that the thing you knew would stay secret? Forever. No one would ever know. Not unless you told them.”

Vivvie knows something. That much was clear. And whatever it is—it’s killing her.

“Tell me,” I said. “You need to tell someone, so tell me.”

Vivvie went very still. I could see her thinking, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t .

I didn’t let her say it. “You can tell me, Vivvie. Haven’t you heard? I’m Tess Kendrick. Worker of miracles. Resident Hardwicke fixer.”

I wasn’t any of those things. I didn’t want to be any of those things. But this was Vivvie, who’d offered to cheer me up by recapping her favorite romance novel (and/or horror movie), and she was crumbling in front of me.

“I can’t.” Vivvie sucked in a breath of air.

“It’s about your father, isn’t it?”

Vivvie couldn’t bring herself to tell me her secret. That didn’t mean I couldn’t guess.

“You know something about your father,” I said, making it a statement instead of a question. “Something about your father and Theo Marquette.” Vivvie had broken down at the wake. She hadn’t been back to school since the day we saw the announcement about Justice Marquette’s death on the news.

As far as guesses went, it was an educated one.

“Maybe you think it was your dad’s fault,” I continued. Now I was just stabbing in the dark. “He was the justice’s doctor. His surgeon. And Justice Marquette died from complications with surgery.”

I was reaching the limit of what I knew. And still, Vivvie said nothing.

Think , I told myself. “Maybe you think your dad did something wrong.” No reaction from Vivvie. “Maybe he operated tired, or inebriated, or maybe you just think he made a mistake.”

Vivvie broke then. “He didn’t make a mistake,” she said fiercely. “My dad doesn’t make mistakes . He—” She cut herself off, then started back up again, terrified but determined. “He didn’t just let Henry’s grandfather die, Tess.” Vivvie bowed her head. “I’m pretty sure he killed him.”