Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
“It’s only Tuesday, and it feels like Thursday already,” Nora told Kim Bales as they entered the buzzing school building. Kim was a ninth-grade English teacher and cheerleading coach, and she had a bubbly personality that made it difficult to have a bad day when she was around. Kim had made friends with Nora right away, and the two of them sometimes spent their planning periods chatting.
“Summer’s right around the corner,” Kim said brightly. “Come by my room if you need to blow off some steam.” Her eyebrows bobbed playfully and she dipped into her classroom.
After dodging excitable students, hallway after hallway, Nora dropped her bag onto her messy desk, her mind on that gorgeous beach bungalow. She bent down to retrieve the printout of the cottage she and Gram would be renting that had slipped under her bookshelf yesterday, but it must have been swept up by the custodians. Oh, well. At least the floor was clean. With the year she’d had she’d barely had time to tidy anything, but today she’d make some.
She found a level spot among her paperwork to support her travel mug full of the coffee Gram had brewed and fixed up just for her as she’d run out of the door this morning.
Sweet Gram . Nora hated leaving her, but their plans for the vacation helped.
With a sense of purpose, she began to organize her desk. She brushed the crumbs off the surface, slid them into her cupped hand and dumped them into the trash can. Then she gathered up the various books she’d bookmarked for lessons and reshelved them. Returning to her desk, she stacked the photos of beach scenes Gram had sent with her and set them on the corner of her desktop.
With her space cleared, Nora set in checking her emails, immediately seeing one from the principal about Ivy’s latest bout of misconduct, downloading a virus onto one of the biology lab computers yesterday during detention. She scanned the message, her eyes falling on the phrase possible expulsion , and then focused on the email from her upcoming appointment: family therapist Janine Swarovski.
In his one phone call to the principal, Blaze had asked if Nora could meet with the woman to discuss Ivy’s progress at school and ways they could transition from Nora to a family setting with Janine off school grounds. Nora had agreed.
It had been clear to Nora early on that Ivy hadn’t fully dealt with the grief of losing her mother or the major transition of moving in with her father. Neither issue was in Nora’s domain as a school counselor, so she was happy to meet with Janine. But Ivy wasn’t connecting with her family therapist, so the administration told Mr. Ryman it might be a good transition to bring the therapist into the school regularly, so she could discuss with Nora the techniques and responses that seemed to work best for Ivy. While Nora had yet to speak to Ivy’s dad personally, he had signed the paperwork online for them to continue.
The problem was, the therapist wasn’t at all the person Nora would’ve chosen for Ivy. The woman’s natural demeanor would never work for the girl. She wasn’t warm enough, and she seemed set in her diagnoses instead of hearing people. Had Blaze screened people at all, or had he plucked someone off the internet? It wasn’t Nora’s job, however, to choose a family counselor; she just had to tell Janine what worked for her at school.
Today the topic with the therapist just happened to be Ivy’s connection to her father. Blaze was a top music producer, working between Nashville, New York, and LA, and it wasn’t clear what, if anything, he was doing to help his daughter. Nora worried that he’d left helping Ivy up to the therapists.
She scanned Ms. Swarovski’s confidential message in her inbox.
Blaze has already gone through a string of caregivers. Ivy ran them all off. The most recent one stayed the longest—three days.
Ivy needed a mother, not a twenty-something who could be her big sister. The teen had no one to grieve with, no one around her who even knew her mother. And Blaze needed to be present for his daughter, but he hadn’t made a single school meeting. In his defense, he hadn’t had time yet to structure his busy lifestyle around Ivy. But Ivy had been with him for a few months now, so he needed to figure it out.
“Hello,” Janine said, coming in with a flourish and offering a handshake—something she did every time they met.
Nora stood up and shook her hand, then offered her a seat. “I was just reading your message about Ivy’s caregivers.”
“Yes.” Janine neatly arranged her ballpoint pen on top of her clean notepad and then folded her hands. “Any new developments on your end before we discuss family dynamics?”
“Principal Coleman emailed Ivy’s dad this morning. She has detention again today. She didn’t want to take her biology exam, but the teacher forced her to, so she downloaded a virus onto the computer, jamming all the programs and erasing everyone’s scores, including hers.”
Janine narrowed her eyes, her gaze roaming the tiled ceiling. “So she has a fixed mindset.”
“Sorry?”
“She’s focusing on how she’s going to perform instead of what she might need to learn.”
Nora tried to maintain a neutral gaze. Janine hadn’t really hit the mark, as usual—this was about attention, about feeling seen—Ivy had said it herself. If Ms. Swarovski was ever going to get through to Ivy, she had to understand the girl. Her blanket judgments weren’t entirely correct. While Nora didn’t want to overstep her bounds as a school counselor, she felt compelled to make this woman understand.
“I think, deep down, Ivy wants acceptance. She’s hurting inside and she needs people to give her a break.”
Janine’s face wrinkled. “What does a computer test have to do with acceptance?”
“Even though Ivy puts up a hardened front, I have to wonder if she really does care what people think about her. She’s more sensitive than she looks.”
Janine wrote the words “school counselor believes Ivy is sensitive” on her paper and then underlined it. She asked Nora, “Why do you think that?”
“Because she got emotional when another child teased her about her pink hair.”
An incredulous laugh burst from Janine’s chest and she set down her pen. “But if she was worried about what people thought about her, why would she choose to stand out with pink hair?”
Had this woman had any training at all?
“She craves emotional acceptance,” Nora clarified. “She told me her mother’s favorite color was pink. Dying her hair her mother’s favorite color is a cry for help. She’s calling out, ‘Someone pay attention to my grief.’”
Janine gave her a placating smile, making Nora’s skin prickle. Nora wanted to shake this woman by the shoulders. No wonder Ivy wouldn’t listen to her. She had no heart.
“Miss Jenkins, I fear that pink hair and acceptance might be a stretch to explain Ivy’s downloading a virus onto a school computer. Her hair color is up to her, but the school’s property is another matter. And I’m just not seeing the connection.”
Nora swallowed the lump of irritation that rose from her chest. She’d have to spell it out for the woman. “Ivy’s behavior is not related to getting a poor grade in biology. She’s trying to tell everyone that, given her circumstances, biology doesn’t matter to her. All she wants to do is process her sorrow, which is something no one has helped her do, to my knowledge. She goes home every day to an empty mansion of a house where there might be a glorified babysitter a few years older than Ivy, who has no experience in managing the death of a parent. She desperately needs her father, but he’s working all the time. She’s alone when she requires people around her who can talk about more than her fixed mindset .” She’d spit out that last bit through gritted teeth. It had come out before she could reign it in, and she clamped her mouth shut before she said any more.
With measured movements, Janine picked up her notepad and pen and slid them into her bag. “You must be having a hard day,” she said through tight lips. “I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere, given your demeanor.” She got up and walked out.
Nora didn’t bother to stop her.
Great . How was she supposed to explain to Principal Coleman and Ivy’s father that she’d run off the family therapist?
She rubbed the pinch in her shoulder. As she stared at the empty doorway, she knew she’d done them all a favor. That woman wasn’t going to help Ivy.
* * *
The rest of the day, Nora tried to fit in as many of her regular activities as she could, working through her planning period to catch up on all the reports and paperwork she’d missed, all the while thinking of ways to repair her blunder with the family counselor somehow. Then after school, she’d spent an hour going from classroom to classroom, rescheduling the lessons she’d missed this week due to Ivy’s antics. The teachers had all heard about Ivy and were very understanding and flexible, which had been a big help.
By the time she’d finished, she had an idea.
She made sure she was outside the classroom when Ivy’s detention let out. She needed to talk to Blaze before she told the principal what had happened with the therapist that morning so Ivy’s father could hear the explanation from her mouth, not Janine’s.
Nora crossed the hallway to greet the girl.
“Hey,” Ivy said under her breath. The girl looked down the hallway in both directions as if scouting out who would see if she talked to a teacher. The coast clear, she made her way over. “What’s up?”
“Ms. Swarovski came for a visit this morning,” Nora told her.
“I saw her in your office, on my way to math class,” Ivy said, rolling her eyes dramatically.
Nora bit her tongue when she really wanted to side with Ivy on this one. “I’d like to talk to your dad about my meeting with her and your biology stunt.”
Ivy blew a deep breath through her lips.
“I’m not calling your dad to get you in trouble,” Nora assured her. “I’m calling to tell him how I think I can help you.”
“How?”
Nora nodded down the hallway to get them out of range of the detention room. Ivy complied, the two of them exiting through the double doors by the gym and into the late spring sunshine and the sidewalk that lined the parking lot.
“What if I was the one to find your next counselor, and you helped me do it? We could meet right after school a couple times a week until the end of the year and see how it goes together. Once we have someone you connect with, the two of you could meet during the summer. We’d have the next three weeks to work on it.”
“Could I get out of class?” Ivy asked.
“Well, I’m not sure I have enough pull to excuse you from classes.” She actually did. She’d spoken to Principal Coleman about it, and he was fine with anything at this point that was the lesser distraction for the other students. “But I thought… hopefully you won’t, but if you get another detention I can ask you to serve it in my office instead.”
A glimmer of what looked like hope sparkled in Ivy’s eyes. “Are you allowed to do that?”
“I have no idea,” Nora said. “But I want to do what’s best for you. Think we can call your dad and get him on our side?”
“Maybe.” Ivy pulled her phone from the drop-pocket of her leopard vest, dialed the number, and held it to her ear while a couple of baseball players climbed into an SUV after practice, their laughter sailing over from the open windows as the vehicle drove away.
It occurred to Nora she’d never heard Ivy laugh.
The girl clicked off her phone. “He didn’t answer.”
Figures . “Think he’s at home?” Nora asked.
Ivy shrugged. “Maybe. He’s not supposed to leave for New York until this evening.”
“Any idea when he’ll be back from New York?”
“No.”
“Do you know what he’ll be doing in New York, exactly?” It wasn’t her place to ask, but come on. This guy was not parenting his daughter.
“There’s a Broadway actress who sings country music, apparently. She’s originally from Georgia, and a video of her singing one of her songs went viral. Dad said he wants to see if he can get her to Nashville to cut a demo and meet with ‘some people.’”
“I have no idea how long that takes,” Nora said.
“Neither do I.”
While Nora didn’t want to enter the murky divide between business and personal, if she didn’t see Blaze before he left, she might not connect with him for a couple of days at least, and she needed to let him know what had transpired with Janine and how she planned to fix it.
“Do you mind if I follow you home to see if I can catch him?” she asked Ivy.
“I guess.”
“Okay, I’m just here.” She pointed to her Honda on the edge of the teacher’s lot.
“That one’s mine.” Ivy pointed to a wreck of a car, pieced together from various scrap parts, all different colors, a dent in the fender.
This is the car of a millionaire’s daughter?
When she surfaced from her thought, Ivy was glaring at her.
“Before you say anything, I wouldn’t let my dad buy me a car. I wanted the one my mom bought for me. We bought this one with just our money. We didn’t need Dad’s money.” Her lips turned downward in a defiant pout. “I still don’t. Money is the root of all evil—my mom taught me that.”
“Fair enough.” She had to give it to Ivy—she valued honor over appearances, which was more than Nora could say for a lot of students at Oakland. “I’ll pull around to you and follow your lead.”
“Okay.”
The two parted ways, and Nora got into her car. She started the engine and backed out of the parking spot. When she drove over to Ivy, the girl wasn’t in the vehicle. Instead, she was outside it, door open, kicking the tires.
Nora put down her window. “Everything all right?”
Ivy turned to her, tears pooling along her bottom, black-lined lashes. “The car won’t start.” She marched around to the front and lifted the hood, securing it with the safety bar and then fiddling with various pieces of the engine. Then she unhooked the bar and banged the hood shut.
Even her car had let her down .
“Why don’t you try to call your dad again?”
With a huff, Ivy slammed the car door and pulled out her phone. The wind blew her pink hair back, revealing her milky skin. Her face was usually covered, as if she could hide behind her locks, but in this moment of defiance and frustration she seemed to have forgotten that anyone would see her.
“Dad?”
A rush of interest shot through Nora, and she leaned over the open window.
“I’m at school… I had detention.” Ivy rolled her eyes and let the phone drop by her side. Then she picked it back up, holding it away from her. “I know… That’s not even why I’m calling.” She held the phone in front of her mouth and barked, “My car won’t start.” Then she put the phone back to her ear. “No, I don’t have any friends … Miss Jenkins is here with me.”
Nora put her hand on the door handle, poised to open it. Could she hop on the phone right now and talk to Blaze?
Ivy leaned away from the phone. “Dad’s busy and wants to know if you can take me home.”
“Um…” Nora wondered whether she was supposed to drive a student in her car. But if she said yes, she could have a word in person with Blaze. “Sure. Hop in.”
Ivy put the phone back up to her ear. “I got a ride.”
She ended the call and climbed inside Nora’s car, lumping her canvas bag between her combat boots. Without a word, she pulled up a map on her phone and started the route. Then she set the phone in the center-console cup holder so Nora could view it.
Nora followed the directions, left school, and turned down a side road leading away from the city. As they drove, Ivy put down her window, the breeze blowing in. The girl leaned away from it, and Nora couldn’t help but compare her behavior with the boys she’d seen earlier. With Ivy’s fingers delicately laced in her lap, her thin frame relaxed, Nora could almost imagine her as a little girl, before her world had fallen around her. As they drove, her usual scowl softened, the tightness between her brows released. It was as if she was calmer knowing no one from school could reach her now.
The two of them drove in silence, allowing Nora’s mind to move to their destination. She was about to enter the grounds of one of the most influential music producers in Nashville.
She’d looked up Blaze online once. He was incredibly handsome—a thick crop of dark hair and gray eyes with flecks of brown, like seawater at low tide. He looked almost her age, in his mid to late thirties, which meant he and his ex had Ivy young. He seemed tall, at least compared to the group of musicians he was standing next to in the photo.
His client list read like a who’s who of music royalty. What had stuck out most was his reputation for honesty, kindness, and impeccable work. The articles made Nora wonder why he hadn’t offered that same attention to his daughter.
She found it interesting that Ivy had never really talked about her father when they were together. Clearly, he worked a lot, but what was he like?
“How is it, living with your dad?” she asked the girl now.
Ivy looked out the open window as the Tennessee hills slid past, and shrugged.
Nora glanced at her, waiting for more, but nothing came. “Surely there’s something you’ve connected on.”
“He’s never home.”
Nora couldn’t argue with that statement.
“We do have something in common. I’m not sure he even knows it, though.”
“What’s that?”
Ivy held back her hair, a few whisps escaping across her cheek. “We both play guitar.”
“Really?”
Ivy nodded. “I’ve never told him I play.”
“Why not?”
“He’s never asked what I do.”
“Maybe you should tell him? Extend an olive branch.”
Ivy looked back out the window.
“Do you have any good memories of him playing guitar? You could start there.”
Her frown relaxed. “When I was really little he’d sit by my bed and strum until I fell asleep.”
With a statement like that, Nora couldn’t help but have optimism for the two of them. “That’s a wonderful memory.”
“That’s about all I’ve got of him—a few memories.”
Not wanting to pry, but wondering what had happened between Ivy’s parents, she said, “Maybe you’ll get to make more memories now.”
“Kind of hard when he’s absent every single day.” The words came out as if they tasted bitter on Ivy’s tongue.
“The two of you have to have been in the same spot at some point.” She came to a four-way stop and waited for the light to turn. “You’ve never gone to the movies, had a meal at home, anything?”
One corner of Ivy’s mouth twitched upward. “We did make dinner one night.”
“What did you make?”
“More like what did we try to make.”
Nora peeked over at her.
“When I first came to live with him, we didn’t really feel like going anywhere, and there was nothing in the house, so we tried to make lasagna with the ingredients we had. We pieced together different recipes from the internet to make our own version, but it came out of the oven like a cinder block. Dad almost broke a steak knife trying to cut it.”
Nora laughed. “How is that possible?”
“That was my question exactly!”
For the first time since Nora had met the girl, Ivy broke into a gorgeous smile—a wide grin with perfectly straight, white teeth. It dawned on Nora how beautiful she was when all that angst was stripped away.
“So what did you two end up doing?”
“We tried to eat it, and there was no way, so we decided to go out. But going out with my dad is difficult because everyone in Nashville knows him, and they won’t leave us alone.”
Nora followed the map, turning in at a gate that led to a neighborhood full of mansions sitting like giant pearls in their manicured lawns on top of the rolling hills. She pulled to a stop at an ornate wrought-iron neighborhood gate that kept all the grandeur secured.
“The code is 77665,” Ivy said.
Nora put down her window and typed in the numbers. The gates slid open.
“So what happened when you went out?” she continued.
“Dad knew this little hole-in-the-wall called Cappy’s. It’s famous for its pickle burgers: burgers with these spicy fried pickles on top—so good. It’s where all the stars go because you can get in through a back door in the alley. We went there.”
“And no one saw you?”
“Nope. Which is perfectly fine by me. Talking to random strangers is annoying.” She let out a little chuckle. “It’s sort of become our spot. Whenever he’s home, we go there to dinner.”
The softness in Ivy’s voice gave away how much those dinners with her dad meant to her.
“This one.” Ivy pointed to a sprawling estate at the end of the street.
The home sat on a hill and had a six-car garage and windows the size of skyscrapers. Nora drove her Honda up the hill and onto the intricately patterned circular driveway. When she parked, Ivy got out, and the two of them walked up to the arched double doors. Ivy typed in a string of numbers on the keypad and the latch clicked open.
“Dad?” she called into the airy two-story entryway with nothing but marble tile glistening under the light of a ten-foot-wide glass-and-iron chandelier. Through the large windows at the back of the house that were visible through the center of the space, a bright blue swimming pool with fountains glistened.
“Da-ad!” Ivy’s voice carried through the expanse.
She pulled out her phone. “I’ll text him. It’s easier.”
Ivy fired off a few lines to Blaze while Nora gazed at the wide, curling staircase. What would it be like living in this huge, cold house? The entry alone felt like a hall in a grand museum.
“He had to leave to fly out,” Ivy said. “Guess that’s why he was busy.” Her eyes were still on her phone, her fingers moving a mile a minute.
“Okay,” Nora said, putting on a smile for Ivy’s benefit. Now what would she do? “Are you going to be all right here on your own?”
“Yeah, Lucia’s probably here somewhere.”
“Lucia?”
“She’s the housekeeper. She’s here until five.”
“And then you’ll be alone?”
“Well, she lives in the guest suite out back.”
“No nanny?”
“I think we’re ‘hiring,’” she said, throwing up air quotes around the last word as she smirked deviously.
“All right.” Nora turned to go, but then stopped. “How will you get your car?”
“I’m ahead of you.” Her shoulder’s slumped forward, an outward expression of her irritation. “I just asked my dad that question. He’s getting it towed. And I have to ride the bus tomorrow. Ugh. I hate all the kids on the bus.”
“How often have you had to ride the bus?”
“I haven’t ever ridden on it.”
“Then how do you know if you hate the kids on the bus?”
“I don’t have to know them to know that I’ll hate them. The way they look at me when I drive past the bus stop is enough.”
Despite her empathy for the girl, Nora gave her a firm look. “Don’t make a ruckus on the bus. Promise?”
Ivy looked up at Nora through thickly mascaraed lashes, her lips set in a straight line. “Never.”
“You’ll never make a ruckus or you’ll never promise?”
“I’ll never promise. If they act like idiots, I’ll have to retaliate.” She slipped her phone into the pocket of her vest.
“Or, if you ignore them and get to school without incident,” Nora said, making her way toward the door, “I’ll pull some strings and let you hang out with me during first period.”
Interest lit up the girl’s face. “I can skip geography? How?”
Nora had heard all about her distaste for the geography teacher. “I have connections.”
A smile twitched at the edges of Ivy’s lips. “Fine.”
As Nora opened the door, a look of solidarity filled her those gray eyes like her father’s. If anyone could help this girl, it was her. But could she get Ivy to a good place before she took off for the summer?