Page 3 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I stay there for a long time, stretched out on the floor, my hands pressing into my eyes until the tears stop and I see stars. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried this hard. I can’t remember ever feeling this lonely, this alone. This…rudderless.
What am I supposed to do? When the man who is supposed to love me hates me? When I can’t protect the woman we both love? When I have a son?
What am I supposed to do?
“MORGAN.”
Her name from my lips results in silence on the other end of the line. Finally Senator Morgan Leffey speaks. “Mr. President.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” my sister asks in a tired voice. “Be respectful?”
“Put distance between us.” I close my eyes and think of Prague. Not with lust, obviously. But with a sort of fondness. She’d been the first lover to show me what I needed, both that time and then again after Jenny’s death. Even when she hated me, she’d still helped me.
I couldn’t discount the debt I owed her for that. Not in the face of this new, terrible debt.
“Why are you calling, Maxen?” she asks. “Is this about the V.A. overhaul? Because I told you that my committee won’t budge on—”
I interrupt her. “It’s about Lyr, Morgan,” I say. “It’s about our son.”
I hear a small intake of breath, then careful stillness. “Who told you?” Morgan asks, in a voice of glass pretending to be stone. “You weren’t ever supposed to know.”
“That’s not true though, is it?” I’m walking around the empty Residence feeling just as empty as the rooms. “You wanted to tell me once. Before Glein.”
“Yes,” she admits. “Before Glein.”
I rub at the spot in my chest where my heart used to be, before Embry tore it out. “Fuck knows you don’t owe me anything Morgan, but why? Why couldn’t I have known?”
“I thought it made us even. You left me to die, and I hid the new life we made from you. It seemed fair at the time.”
“And now?”
Morgan lets out a breath, and I can picture her running her thumb along her forehead, just like I do when I’m thoughtful or stressed or sorrowful. “And now I don’t know.”
“I grew up thinking I had a father who didn’t care about me. And then you told me the truth about my parents at Jenny’s funeral, and I knew for a fact that my father didn’t care about me. All I ever wanted was not to do that…not to be that. And now that’s what you’ve made me. The same kind of man.”
Morgan’s voice is sharp when she answers. “You want to pout about not having a father? What about my mother, Maxen? The one you killed when you were born? You think I don’t miss her? That I wasn’t scarred or lost or damaged knowing that she’d gone to bed with a man who wasn’t my father and ended up dying because of it?”
“Dammit, Morgan, do you think I don’t know that? That I don’t feel her loss too? That I don’t feel the karmic weight of being born under such a fucking cloud?”
“Don’t try that with me. You had Althea. You had a mother. I only ever had Governor Vivienne Moore, and even as stepmothers go, she was fucking cold. My father was a husk. I grew up alone.”
“You had Embry,” I point out.
“You had Kay,” she retorts.
I stop at the window in the dining room, looking out on the night-dark lawn. Past the fence, headlights and taillights move through the District’s streets, lamplights glow, window squares of yellow light point to where the brightest minds of Washington are burning the midnight oil on policy and lobbying and diplomacy. “This is pointless,” I say. “This who-had-it-worse game.”
She sighs. “Fine. But you have to understand why I wanted something different for Lyr. Vivienne suggested Nimue raise him instead, and Nimue is happy and kind and undamaged. She’s not like us, Maxen. There’s no stain on her. And I knew she’d be a better parent than either of us.”
I listen to her. To the pain in her voice. And something in me cracks. “Was it hard? To give him to Nimue?”
She lets out a noise that should be a laugh but sounds like a sob. “There isn’t a word for how hard it was. When he was born, he was so, so quiet, and so stoic, like you. He didn’t even cry when I put him in Nimue’s arms. He just looked at me, resigned and silent. Like he’d been waiting for me to let him down all along.”
There’s silence for a long time, for both of us. Each of us lost in our own pain.
“I want to tell him, Morgan. I want to meet him.”
