I arrived back at Ivy’s house to see flashing lights. I was out of the car before Keyes could order me to stay put. I pushed past the police cruiser in the driveway.
“Ivy?” I called out her name a second before I laid eyes on her. She was wearing a navy blazer, her light brown hair clipped neatly back from her face.
“I assure you,” Ivy was telling an officer, the very picture of composure, “everything is fine.” She saw me approach. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see to my daughter.”
Having dispatched the police officer, she ushered me into the house.
“What happened?” I asked her, my voice low.
“As far as the police are concerned,” Ivy said, “nothing. The alarm went off quite by accident.”
“What really happened?” I countered.
I could see Ivy weighing her choices. Ultimately, she must have decided I could handle the truth. “There was a break-in. They tossed my office but didn’t find what they were looking for.”
I didn’t question why Ivy had sent the police away. If someone had broken through her security, she wouldn’t want that to get out.
“What were they looking for?” I asked.
Ivy glanced toward the door, as if she could see through it. “Leverage.”
William Keyes waited for the police to leave before he approached the house.
“Wait upstairs,” Ivy told me.
She didn’t ask where I’d been when she’d arrived home. I wondered if the kingmaker would point out that if I hadn’t gone with him, I might have been here when someone broke in. And then I wondered if she would counter that it seemed awfully coincidental that he’d gotten me out of the house right before someone had broken in and torn her office apart.
Looking for something. Something to do with Walker Nolan. My mind was jumbled as I ascended the spiral staircase. I paused at the top but heard nothing.
Keyes met with Georgia Nolan. The president’s son knew this terrorist attack was going to happen. People are asking questions.
The thoughts came rapid fire, one on the heel of another, until Ivy appeared upstairs. Her gaze faltered for a moment when it landed on me.
“Is this the part where you get mad at me for the things I can’t tell you, or the part where I remind you that you can’t trust William Keyes?” There was no edge in Ivy’s voice, no hint of anger or exasperation.
She sounded tired.
There were so many things I wanted to say to her. I wanted to tell her that she could trust me, that all keeping me in the dark accomplished was pushing me further away. I wanted to say that it wasn’t fair that she got to protect me, but I was expected to just sit back and let her, as Keyes had put it, play with fire.
I wanted to tell her that she wasn’t allowed to do this to me again. But she was tired, and she was here, and she was in one piece.
“This is the part where I do my homework,” I said softly, “and you order takeout, and we both pretend that everything is fine.”