I didn’t tell Ivy my name was Tess, not Tessie. I didn’t tell her I could take care of myself.

“I’ll call Vivvie,” I countered instead. “She was born to slumber party. We’ll be fine.”

Ivy was quiet for a second, maybe two, as she turned that possibility over in her head. “I love you,” she said. “More than anything. You know that, right?”

“Sure.” I didn’t want those words to affect me the way they did. I didn’t want them to mean that much. I didn’t want them to hurt.

“I mean it, Tessie. If it came down to the rest of the world or you, I would pick you every single time.”

Tears I’d kept at bay all day stung my eyes. “Be careful,” I told her, my voice fierce.

She ran her hand over my hair one last time, then turned and walked to the door, her heels clicking a steady beat against the marble floor. “I always am.”

CHAPTER 29

“I would ask if you’re okay, but at this point, that seems a little passé.” Vivvie gave me a very small smile. Seconds ticked by, and she just couldn’t help herself. “Are you okay?” she blurted out.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Vivvie peered at me. “Does that mean that you’re actually okay, or that you’re stoically projecting that you will be okay at some undefined point in the future?”

I bit back a smile. Vivvie was Vivvie, no matter the circumstances. “Probably the second one,” I admitted.

“You do stoic well,” Vivvie told me. “Does Stoic Tess want to talk about it or not want to talk about it?” After a second or two, she answered her own question. “Not talk about it,” she said, translating the expression on my face. “I can do that.” She paused. “Just to clarify, does it include the attack on the president? Or just . . .”

She didn’t say John Thomas’s name.

“Ivy’s out there right now, doing who knows what,” I said. Not thinking—and not talking—about the attack on the president wasn’t an option. I could only suppress so much. “She got a call from the First Lady,” I continued.

Vivvie’s eyes widened. “Did she say—”

“Ivy didn’t say what Georgia wanted. She didn’t say anything about who they think is responsible for shooting the president.”

Senza Nome. The name Priya had given the terrorist group echoed in my head, followed on its heels by Daniela Nicolae’s ominous words. The time for waiting is over.

We’d thought the video Daniela Nicolae had made was about the hospital bombing. We thought that she had failed in her mission.

Maybe we’d thought wrong.

“You’ve got that look on your face,” Vivvie told me. “The one you get when you’re thinking about something you probably shouldn’t be thinking about.”

Vivvie’s aunt had sent her out of the room before she’d passed on the message about Senza Nome. Whether I liked it or not, the less Vivvie knew, the safer she was.

On some level, I recognized that my reasoning sounded exactly like Ivy’s.

“Henry and I were talking the other day.” I felt like I needed to tell Vivvie something true, even if it wasn’t the truth I most wanted to share. “About the way that things like this hit us harder than they hit other people because of what we’ve already lost.” I paused, searching Vivvie’s dark brown eyes the way she’d searched mine earlier. “Are you okay?”

“I should be,” Vivvie offered with an uneven smile that wavered as she spoke. “I didn’t like John Thomas. I didn’t see it happen, like you did. And it’s not like I actually knew the president, but . . .” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “My dad was President Nolan’s doctor. He saw him every day, and I just keep thinking . . .” Vivvie’s voice got softer the more she spoke. “I just keep thinking that if my dad were alive, if he’d never gotten involved with the conspiracy, never done what he did to Justice Marquette—my dad would be there, with the president, working to save his life.”

Vivvie looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “And then,” she continued, “I think about how if my dad were here, I’d make dinner and put it in the refrigerator so he’d have something to eat when he got home. And I think about the fact that if my dad were here, he’d be worried about me. He’d be in doctor mode one minute and dad mode the next, and he’d call me when he could and tell me that it was normal to feel grief when someone you know is killed, even if you didn’t like the person. He’d tell me that it was okay to be scared that something like that could happen at my school, and he’d tell me not to worry.” Vivvie pressed her eyes closed, and I knew that she was counting on her eyelids to hold back tears. “He’d tell me that he would never let anything bad happen to me.”