Page 59 of The Ruling Class
This time, I managed to form a coherent sentence. “Henry, can you pick me up?” My heart thudded against my rib cage. “We need to talk.”
CHAPTER 37
Henry Marquette drove a hybrid. When he pulled up to the curb next to me, Asher was sprawled across the backseat, leaving me no choice but to crawl into the front. As I shut the door, I caught sight of my reflection in the window. My hair was falling out of its ponytail, flyaway pieces stuck to my forehead with sweat. I couldn’t make out enough of my face to tell if it betrayed how close I’d come to crying.
No more.I was done with this. Tears were useless. Crying was useless. I focused on Henry—and the unalterable fact that I wasscrewed.
From the second I saw the set of Henry’s features—the tense jaw, the down-turned lips, the eyes that betrayed the mix of emotions swirling in his chest—I knew that I wouldn’t be able to lie to him. Henry wasn’t aproblem. He wasn’t a fire to be put out, or a situation to be handled.
He had a right to know.
“Someone once cautioned me against making assumptions,” he said. He had a death grip on the wheel, his eyeslocked on the road. “So you’re not going to make me assume, Tess. You’re going to tell me if that was just the piña coladas talking, or if Asher …”
Was telling the truth. My brain finished his sentence as if it were my own.
I swallowed, then summoned my voice. “Four days ago,” I said quietly, “Vivvie Bharani told me that she thought her father had killed a patient.”
“My grandfather.” Henry’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
I nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at me—wouldn’tlook at me.
“Talk,” Henry said roughly. “Every detail, every suspicion, every single thing you know, Tess.”
The phone. The voice on the other end. That voice’s identity.I told Henry everything. Not just for him. For me. I kept picturing Vivvie’s father lifting a gun to his temple. I kept picturing his blood splattered on a wall.
Secrets came at a cost.
So I told Henry. Maybe a part of me wanted his anger. I wanted him to lash out. I wanted him to blame me, the way I blamed myself.
“Asher knew?” Henry almost choked on those words. I glanced back at Asher—self-destructive,loyalAsher, who’d been Henry’s best friend since they were kids.
“He wanted to tell you.”
I could see Henry thinking,But he didn’t. “I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you—or to your sister, for that matter—to take this to the police.” That wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.
“Ivy’s working on it.” That was all I could say, all she’d told me.
“You might trust your sister towork onthis,” Henry said, his voice soft, with a lethal thread of steel. “But I most certainly do not.”
A fuller understanding of what my telling Henry meant slammed into me like a semitruck broadsiding a car. Henry despised Ivy’s occupation. He believed that when she “fixed” things, she left destruction in her wake. I’d known he wouldn’t be able to sit on this information. I’dknownthat, and I’d told him everything anyway.
Because I had to.
“Do what you have to do,” I told Henry, “but remember that if it wasn’t for Vivvie, none of us would know what really happened. She’s the only reason there’s anything towork on, and it cost her everything.”
Her father. Her home. The naive certainty that there were people in this world that you could count on not to blacken your eyes.
I leaned forward, so that I could see all of Henry’s face, so that out of his peripheral vision, he might catch a hint of mine. “Whatever you do with this information,” I told him, “whoeveryoutrust with it, you better make sure they can protect her.”
Ivy hadn’t even told the president. To protect Vivvie. To protect me.
Henry absorbed my words. “You said there were two numbers on the phone?” he asked after an extended silence.
Hewouldcatch that.
“The other number was disconnected.” I wondered if Henry was coming to the conclusion that I had reached: that in order forVivvie’s dad to kill his grandfather, someone had to get Justice Marquette into surgery first.
Did they poison him somehow?
