“You really need to think about the fact that, according to my sources, you’ve had my minor daughter in questioning for almost an hour—without my permission or a child advocate present. Whatever questions you haven’t asked in that time can wait.” Ivy looked from one officer to the other, her expression deadly. “She’s a child. She’s traumatized, she’s exhausted, and she’s still wearing a dead boy’s blood.”

Ivy’s words had their intended impact: the officers looked distinctly wary and they remembered that there was blood on my clothing.

“We’ll need those pants,” one of the officers said. From the expression on his face, he half expected Ivy to bite his head off for even asking. Instead, Ivy turned to me and nodded. “Bodie’s in the hallway. He’ll have a change of clothes.”

I didn’t spend even a second wondering how Bodie had known to bring a change of clothes, or how it was that Ivy’s read on the situation was so precise. She’d gotten me out of the room.

After I surrendered the bloodied pants, she took me home.

CHAPTER 28

“Drink this.” Ivy handed me a mug filled with warm liquid. My fingers encircled the mug, but I didn’t lift it to my lips.

Ivy hadn’t asked me to tell her about finding John Thomas. She hadn’t cross-examined me. She hadn’t called a lawyer or started acting like one herself. She’d sat in the backseat next to me on the car ride home. She’d put an arm around me when we’d arrived at the house and climbed out. She’d made this drink and slid it across the kitchen counter to me.

“Hot chocolate with a splash of coffee.” Ivy met my eyes over the mug. “Nora Kendrick’s cure for all ills.”

I’d spent most of my life thinking that Nora Kendrick was my mother. Swallowing back the rush of emotion that accompanied that thought, I lifted the mug to my lips and let the drink warm me from the inside out.

“Have you heard anything?” I asked Ivy once I’d found my voice. “About President Nolan?”

Ivy turned and began making herself a mug of hot chocolate, too. “I spoke to Georgia.” A slight hitch in her voice contradicted her outward calm. “The president is still in surgery. We won’t know how extensive the damage is until he gets out.”

People died in surgery. They died in surgery all the time.

I could see awareness of that fact in Ivy’s eyes. She’d worked on President Nolan’s campaign. Whenever he or the First Lady had problems, Ivy was their first call. Georgia treated her like a daughter.

“You haven’t asked me,” I said, offering her an out from thinking about it, from talking about it, “what I saw.”

Ivy turned back to face me, her own coffee mug held between two hands. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Did I want to talk about John Thomas’s last gasping moments? About pressing my hands to his chest, trying to staunch the flow of blood? About the moment when his eyes went empty, and his head lolled to the side?

“I hated him.” I stared down at my hot chocolate. “The boy who got killed, John Thomas Wilcox—I hated him.”

Ivy knew when to keep quiet. I filled the silence, unable to stop talking now that I’d started.

“He was a horrible person. The day I arrived at Hardwicke, he was showing off pictures of the vice president’s daughter.” I paused and let that pause do the talking about the type of photos John Thomas had taken. “She’s fourteen. He told her he liked her. He told her she was special, and then he laughed at her while he flashed those pictures around.

“This morning, he baited Asher into a fight. He told the entire school that Henry’s father was in and out of rehab before he died.” The more I talked, the faster the words came. “He texted these pictures of Emilia where she’s totally out of it to the whole school. A video, too.” I swallowed, remembering the words John Thomas had used to taunt Asher. “He said things about that night. I don’t know how much Emilia remembers. I don’t know if John Thomas assaulted her, but he enjoyed making her think that he did.”

Ivy held her expression carefully constant, but I caught a surge of anger in her eyes.

I closed mine. “An hour before he died, John Thomas told me that he’d accessed Hardwicke’s confidential medical files, that he knew who’d been treated for eating disorders and depression and—” I swallowed back the fury that still wanted to come, thinking about the way he’d singled out Vivvie. “He threatened to tell everyone the details.”