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.”

CHAPTER 22

Vivvie thinks her father murdered the chief justice of the Supreme Court. There was no amount of processing that could make something like that sink in.

“I know it sounds crazy,” Vivvie told me haltingly. “Believe me, I know. And it’s not like I have the world’s most stellar track record for teenage sanity—freshman year, dark time, there may have been some Prozac involved. But this . . .” She bit her bottom lip. “I would give anything for this to all be in my head.”

I could barely keep up with the words as they tumbled out of her mouth.

“I asked him about it,” Vivvie continued. She thought her father was a murderer, and she’d asked him about it? “He grabbed me. And he shook me, and he told me that if I really believed what I was saying, then maybe I needed professional help.”

He’d threatened her. Told her she was crazy. But what he hadn’t done was taken her to see a doctor. He’d let her stay home from school. Alone.

Those weren’t the actions of a concerned father.

“I heard him, Tess. Whenever he has to give a speech, he practices. In front of the mirror. Every word, every pause, every emotion.”

I thought of the press release. Major Bharani hadn’t been reading a script. He’d looked straight at the camera. He’d been authoritative, calm.

“I heard him practicing.” Vivvie forced herself to breathe, forced her voice to stay low. “The shower was running. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d left for school, but I circled back to ask him something—I don’t even remember what. I was getting ready to call out, and that was when I heard him.” She held my gaze, her brown eyes steady. “Practicing.”

Practicing what? I was afraid that if I said those words out loud—if I said anything—she might stop talking.

“ ‘It is with great sadness,’ ” Vivvie whispered, “ ‘that I inform you that Chief Justice Theodore Marquette died on the table a little over an hour ago.’ ”

I recognized the beginning of the statement Dr. Bharani had issued at the press conference.

“He practiced his statement,” I said, not quite seeing where she was going.

“Tess, he practiced it that morning.” Vivvie’s voice caught in her throat. “Justice Marquette died that afternoon.”

I processed what Vivvie was saying. Her father had prepared a speech announcing the justice’s death from unforeseen complications with surgery before the surgery had ever taken place.

“That’s not all.” Vivvie started walking again. I strode to catch up with her. Midday, the neighborhood was nearly empty. On the opposite sidewalk, there was a woman walking a dog. Vivvie kept her voice low enough that I had to struggle to hear her.

“I stayed home sick the next day. I’d convinced myself that I’d misheard, or misunderstood, but then I heard my dad talking on the phone, which was weird, because his phone was on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t on the landline, either.”

Vivvie was babbling now, and I had to fight to find the meaning in her words.

“I think it might have been a disposable. Why would my dad have a disposable cell phone?”