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thought Tess and I might go shopping this afternoon, get some clothes for her first day at Hardwicke.”
    Shopping? With Ivy?
    Bodie let out a bark of laughter at the expression on my face. “Hate to tell you this, princess, but the kid looks like she’d rather rip out her own thumbnails and use them to gouge out her eye than go shopping with you.”
    Ivy wasn’t deterred. “She’ll adjust.”
    Adam’s phone rang. He excused himself, leaving me staring down my sister, and Bodie watching the two of us with no small amount of amusement.
    “Have you heard from the doctors in Boston yet?” I asked Ivy.
    “Not yet.” For a second, I thought that might be all she was going to say, but then she elaborated. “They’ll be doing a complete diagnostic assessment in the next few days.”
    Days.
I swallowed, unable to keep my mind from latching on to the word.
Days. And weeks. And months. And none of it good.
I forced my expression to stay neutral. I couldn’t let myself godown that road. I couldn’t think about Gramps. I couldn’t think about the future.
    Adam walked back into the room. “Ivy.” His tone was low, serious.
    Ivy turned to look at him. “Everything okay?”
    Adam glanced at Bodie and me, as if to say,
not around the children
.
    “Let me guess,” Bodie drawled, poking at Adam like someone taunting a bear with a stick. “The Pentagon?”
    “That wasn’t the Pentagon,” Adam said curtly. “That was my father.”
    His father—the one Adam had said Ivy was on good terms with three years ago. The one she presumably was not on good terms with now.
    “And?” Ivy prompted, in a tone that told me that there was always an
and
with Adam’s father.
    “And,” Adam said, his face devoid of emotion, “he was calling to tell me that Theo Marquette was just rushed to Bethesda General. Heart attack. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.” He let that sink in for a second before continuing. “They’ve got a lid on it for now, but the press will know in a matter of hours.”
    Ivy took a beat to absorb that information, then locked her hand around Adam’s elbow and pulled him to the side of the room for a hushed conversation. In less than a minute, Ivy was on her phone, barking out commands.
    Glancing back over her shoulder at me, she lowered her voice. “Sorry, Tess. Something’s come up. When I have an update on Gramps, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, Bodie can take you shopping for anything you need.”
    I should have been grateful for the reprieve—but really, it was just a reminder that Ivy could and would ditch me at the drop of a hat. I might not have known what my sister’s job was, or why news of some guy’s heart attack had sent her into hyperdrive, or even why the name
Theo Marquette
sounded vaguely familiar in the first place. But the one thing I
did
know was that Adam was right—Ivy never should have brought me here.
    It was only a matter of time before she dropped me for good.
    I didn’t say a word when Ivy shut herself in her office, or when she left the house, power walking like the devil was on her heels. I let Bodie make me pancakes. It wasn’t until later, after I’d eaten four of them, that I realized suddenly where I’d heard the name
Theo Marquette
before.
    Theodore Marquette was the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

 
    CHAPTER 6
    Ivy was still in crisis mode the next morning, but—lucky me—she managed to carve half an hour out of her schedule to take me to school. In the back of my mind, I’d expected the illustrious Hardwicke School to look like Hogwarts. Needless to say, I was severely disappointed. The Upper School—because heaven forbid they call it a
high school
—looked like nothing so much as a granola bar turned on its side.
    “The facilities here are just fantastic,” Ivy told me as we walked down a stone path toward the historic home that served as the administrative building. “The Maxwell Art Center has one of the largest