The Fix

Seventeen-year-old Cami Cortlandt, a cheerleader in Aspen Cove, Virginia, attends a pool party at her boyfriend Hollis Barclay's mansion while secretly suspecting she is pregnant. Stepping away from the crowd, she shares a brief but meaningful conversation with Rex Lowe, a quiet classmate who works as a statistician for the football team. Hollis interrupts and dismisses Rex, and Cami leaves the party early.

That evening, Cami arrives home to find two armed intruders, Trig and AJ, who have already bound and gagged her mother, Farrah, and her younger sister, Elle. Over a horrific night, the men rape all three women, film the assaults, and force Cami's father, Judge Randolph Cortlandt, to watch the recordings from where he is bound. Cami uses a compact mirror to flash reflected light through her bedroom window at their neighbor, Mrs. Willoughby. The next morning, as the men prepare to kill the family, Cami frees herself by sawing through her duct tape bonds with a shard of the broken mirror. She hears gunshots as the men execute her mother and sister, retrieves her father's hidden gun, and shoots Trig dead. AJ escapes. Police, summoned by Mrs. Willoughby, arrive. Cami's mother lives long enough to whisper broken words that sound like "do of her" before dying. Elle is already gone. Their father, severely beaten, survives.

Rex learns of the attack from his aunt Carolyn, a hospital nurse, and glimpses Cami in a hallway, battered and blank-eyed. Days later, police pull him from class as a person of interest because his legal name, Alexander John, shares the initials "AJ" with the escaped attacker. Asked whether Rex could have been AJ, the traumatized Cami responds in a flat voice that it could have been him. Though DNA evidence clears Rex, the suspicion destroys his prospects: His college scholarships are rescinded. He takes a job as a grocery store cashier, where he later encounters a heavily pregnant Cami. Both acknowledge they are not okay. Rex pockets a military recruitment ad from the breakroom bulletin board.

Months earlier, Cami told Hollis about the pregnancy, conceived before the attack. Hollis refused to believe the baby was his and left abruptly. Cami gives birth to a boy, holds him briefly, and hands him to her father to deliver to the adoptive couple she selected through Open Hearts Adoptions. She is devastated but believes adoption is the most loving choice.

Eleven years later, Rex returns to Aspen Cove to settle his deceased grandfather's estate. Physically transformed after years of military service and a career in cyber intelligence, he is no longer the hunched, shy boy Cami remembers. Cami, now 28, runs Flutterfly Gardens, a butterfly farm and sanctuary she built in honor of her mother and sister. When her employee discovers free plants at a garden estate sale, Cami accompanies her crew and discovers the property belongs to Rex. Their reunion is tense: Rex tells her bluntly that the fallout from her family's crime ruined his life too.

That evening, Cami receives a phone call from a distorted female voice offering her a "do-over," followed by a photo of a young boy locked in a barred room. The boy looks strikingly like her. The caller directs Cami to a live video feed on the dark web and warns her not to contact police. Cami discovers the adoption agency she used was shut down after a lawsuit over negligent vetting. With no one else possessing the technical expertise she needs, she returns to Rex and begs for help.

Rex agrees. Monitoring the feed, they observe the boy's captor tell him that unnamed parties are coming at the end of the week. The boy, defiant and resourceful, reveals his adoptive parents died and he now lives with a foster family that does not care about him. Cami identifies him as Cyrus after watching him carve his name into the wall and narrows his location to Northern California by spotting a Pacific tree frog outside the window. Rex's friend Joaquin Andazola, a celestial navigation expert, uses star photographs from the feed to place Cyrus within 60 miles of Soledad, California.

Rex and Cami fly west and drive up the coast. They confirm the area when a bookstore owner recognizes the captor's photo. Rex uses a plane contrail visible through Cyrus's window and flight radar data to pinpoint the cabin near McWay Falls. As they close in, Cyrus executes his own escape plan: He attacks the captor with a loosened metal bedpost and a hidden utensil, then runs into the forest.

Rex races to the cabin while the captor pursues Cyrus with a gun. Cornered at a cliff, Cyrus hurls dirt in the man's face while Rex distracts him by shaking trees. Rex tackles the blinded captor and pushes him over the edge to his death. Cyrus, whose late adoptive father was also a soldier, trusts Rex after seeing his military identification. When Cami meets Cyrus, he recognizes her as his biological mother from a newspaper photo. He reveals he sent Hollis an email through his campaign website asking for help but never received a reply. A detective secures emergency custody, and Cami takes Cyrus back to Virginia, where DNA confirms he is her son.

As Rex and Cami grow closer and begin a romantic relationship, they investigate both crimes. Rex's friend pulls geolocation data linking the cabin to the Kiss family estate in Washington, DC. The Kiss family are professional "fixers," operatives hired to make problems disappear for elite clients. Rex discovers that Hollis's fiancée, Seraphina Arnoult, is the daughter of Glory Jacobson, a classical violinist whose career was destroyed by a man Judge Cortlandt released with a lenient sentence. Glory hired the Kiss family to terrorize the Cortlandts in retaliation, but the hired men went far beyond the plan.

Seraphina lures Cami to a meeting, drugs her, and reveals the full truth: Hollis's mother, Felicia Barclay, arranged Cyrus's kidnapping through the Kiss family to protect Hollis's political career. Convinced that Felicia will never stop targeting Cyrus and that legal channels cannot overcome the Barclays' wealth and power, Seraphina has Cami bound in an office overlooking Hollis's campaign rally, then climbs the stage and shoots Felicia point-blank on live television. Rex, who tracked a phone in Cami's purse, spots Cami's flickering lamp signal through a tinted window and kicks down the door to free her.

Interspersed throughout the novel, flashback chapters reveal the story of Josephine "Posey" Kiss, the brilliant daughter of the Kiss family patriarch. When her dying father named Posey his successor over her brother Anton, Anton retaliated by orchestrating a gang rape that left Posey with quadriplegia, then imprisoned her in the estate for decades. Using her wheelchair's Bluetooth and voice-assistive technology, Posey secretly hacked Anton's files and sabotaged his operations, sometimes offering intended targets a "do-over." She tried to warn the Cortlandts before the attack, but Cami's mother intercepted the call and failed to act, explaining her dying words: She had been trying to say "do-over." Years later, Posey hacked the cabin camera, posted the feed for Cami, and guided Rex through coded messages. Rex, piecing together her identity, poses as her doctor and carries her out of the estate. Posey drains Anton's accounts before escaping, and Anton is later arrested.

Three months after Rex leaves for a new NSA job in Colorado, Cami and Cyrus arrive at his door to declare their love. Rex laughs because his apartment is packed in boxes: He quit and was about to drive back to Virginia for them. They return to Aspen Cove together, where Rex plans to open an investigation firm with friends, including Posey as a consultant. Six months later, Posey leaks security footage of Hollis threatening Cami, destroying his political career. In the novel's final scene, Cami and Cyrus visit Posey at her new seaside home, where Posey releases a box of butterflies from her deck, watching them rise toward the sky.