Walker Nolan had volunteered his medical services overseas for two years under the Doctors Without Borders banner. I wanted to believe that it was a coincidence that Daniela Nicolae had worked for the same group.
I wanted to, but I didn’t.
Homeland Security apprehended her based on an anonymous tip, my brain kept reminding me.
Ivy solved problems. Walker Nolan had one—and his problem had required the help of Ivy’s contact at the Pentagon.
“You are being suspiciously quiet.” Henry had volunteered to drive me home. Until now, both of us had passed the ride in silence. Henry slanted his eyes briefly toward mine. “The last time you were this quiet, Kendrick, you were plotting the downfall of Jeremy Bancroft’s father.”
I’d promised Bodie I wouldn’t say a word to anyone about Walker Nolan. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d kept something from Henry.
It probably wouldn’t be the last.
“I’m not plotting anything,” I told the boy next to me. “Promise.”
“I feel so very comforted,” Henry said. He came to a stop at a red light and turned to look at me head-on. “This is my comforted face.”
“You sound like Asher,” I retorted. “He has a face for every occasion.”
“Whereas you,” Henry said, “just have a poker face, the appearance of which is typically a cause for concern.”
“I’m not the only one who’s been quiet,” I pointed out. Henry had passed the first half of this drive just as caught up in his thoughts as I was in mine. And I’m not the only one with a poker face, I added silently.
I’d been thinking about Walker Nolan. What had Henry been thinking about?
“John Thomas Wilcox.” Henry had a gift for changing the subject and making it sound like he wasn’t changing it at all. “Today in fifth period. Whatever he said about you, about Ivy, he is not worth even a moment of your thoughts.”
“Doesn’t it strike you as a little hypocritical to tell me not to pay attention to anything John Thomas says about Ivy?” I asked lightly. “It’s not like you’ve ever been a member of the Ivy Kendrick fan club.”
I expected Henry to come back with a quick retort, but instead, he fell silent again.
A year before I’d arrived at Hardwicke, Henry’s father had died in a car accident—or at least that was the story most people believed. Henry had told me the truth: his father had committed suicide, and Ivy had covered it up. No one but Henry and Ivy—and now me—knew what had really happened.
She made me complicit. I could still see the anguished expression on Henry’s face when he’d said those words.
I hadn’t meant, even for a second, to make him feel like that again.
“You’re nothing like John Thomas,” I told Henry. “I know that. I’m sorry. I just—”
“Dislike being advised on how to deal with him when you’re quite capable of handling the John Thomas Wilcoxes of the world on your own?” Henry suggested.
“That,” I agreed. “But also—I wasn’t even thinking about him. I was thinking about what happened today, about the bombing.” That was as close to the truth as I could come without breaking my promise to Bodie.
I was thinking about Walker Nolan and Daniela Nicolae.
“It’s different,” Henry said softly, “for those of us who’ve lost people.”
Hardwicke was a world apart from my previous school in Montana. Anna Hayden’s Secret Service detail was a constant presence in the hallways. Closed-circuit cameras monitored the entire campus. All visitors were pre-screened. Although discreet, the school’s security officers were also armed.
Going to a school that was more secure than most government facilities had a strange effect: at Hardwicke, students were more aware of the potential for wide-scale attacks, but they’d fostered in us a deep-seated belief that it couldn’t happen here.
Some of our classmates had been shaken by today’s attack. Others, like John Thomas, had been more able to shrug it off. But Henry was right—it would always be different for people like us.
The closer you’d been to death, the easier it was to feel him breathing down your neck—and the necks of those you loved.
“I can still see Ivy with that bomb strapped to her chest.” I hadn’t told that to anyone. I turned to look out the window to keep Henry from seeing the expression on my face. “Sometimes,” I continued softly, “I wake up in the middle of the night, and for a second, I’m back in that basement with a rogue Secret Service agent.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Henry gave me tit for tat. “I’m the one who found my father.”
I didn’t turn to look at Henry. If I’d been looking at him, he wouldn’t have said the words.
“That’s what I thought about when I heard about the attack,” Henry said. “That’s what I saw. My father was just . . . lying there, on the floor. His eyes were open, but . . . empty. I wasn’t supposed to be home that weekend. None of us were. And when I found him . . .”
My eyes found their way to his, drawn by magnetic force.
“I left,” Henry said. “I just . . . I left. And I got the call a few hours later about the crash.”
The crash that Ivy staged.
Grief was like a set of stacking dolls, each subsequent trauma encompassing all of those that had come before. At four, I hadn’t known how to mourn my parents—Ivy’s parents, really. But I’d mourned them at thirteen, when Ivy had walked out of my life, and at fifteen, when Gramps had started to slide. I’d felt it again and again and again these past months.
No one had died today in the bombing. But we hadn’t known that, not at first.
Henry swallowed. I could see him locking down his emotions, hiding them, even from himself. “Tess. What I just told you—”
“Stays between us,” I said. Henry Marquette didn’t trust easily. We had that much in common. “I can keep a secret,” I said.
I was already keeping so many. What was one more?