Page 35 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
She moves her own phone onto my desk, sliding past a screen and pulling up a picture of a dark-haired youth. When she spins the phone around so I can have a better look, I have to catch my breath.
It’s Ash, it looks just like Ash.
Younger, of course, and there are a few differences here and there. Lyr has longer hair, tousled and messy and curled at the ends in a way that surely makes his classmates swoon, and his features are slightly more angular than Ash’s, more otherworldly beauty than the masculine strength his father has. But otherwise I could be looking at a teenaged photo of my husband. The black hair, the full lips with their sharp upper peaks, the eyes as green as old bottle glass.
I understood before, what it meant for Ash to have a son. I understood what it meant for us and for Morgan and the boy himself, and everybody caught in the tragic web around him. I understood that Ash had fathered a child on a woman that I am jealous of, and I understood that we had not yet had a child of our own. I understood that my jealousy of Morgan would grow a thousand fold, that she could do by accident what I so wanted to do on purpose.
But seeing this boy, so handsome and tall like his father, shakes some new kind of understanding into me, which is the same knowledge, but deeper and heavier and more terrible, and it’s crushing my chest and balling my throat.
Ash has a child.
Embry will have a child.
I am not the mother of any of those children.
And in this moment, it doesn’t matter that Ash never loved Morgan or that Embry might actually despise Abilene, because they will still always be bound to these women in a way that can’t be expunged or blanked out. They will share a connection that I have no part of, that I have nothing to do with, and I will forever be exiled from these pieces of them. There are now parts of the men I love that will never belong wholly to me. There are places inside them that are forever stamped with another woman’s name, and even if I have children of my own, I will always, always have to share that title of mother of my children with someone else.
“Handsome, isn’t he?” Abilene says. Too late I realize that I’ve been staring at Lyr’s picture for too long, and although I’m normally quite good at mastering my expression, there’s no doubt Abilene saw a glimpse of the tumult inside my mind.
“He is,” I comment, pushing the phone back to her. “He looks like his father.”
“You can see why I knew for sure after I saw the boy,” Abilene says, taking her phone and giving the picture a fond glance. “And for a long time, I was happy with just knowing. It didn’t taint Maxen for me at all, you see, and I hated the idea that people would take this and turn it into some tawdry V.C. Andrews-style story.”
“But you don’t hate that idea anymore? You’re okay with ruining his life and Lyr’s life and Morgan’s?”
Her eyes flash. “I would never ruin his life.”
I’m suddenly furious again, and I try to hide it by standing up and walking over to the window so she can’t see my face. “Then what is it you think you’re doing now?”
“He needs to know that I’ll love him no matter what,” she says confidently. “Then he’ll see. When everyone else has left him, when everyone else has abandoned him, I’ll be there. And I won’t care what he’s done with Morgan, I won’t care that they had a son. I’ll be the only one to forgive him for everything. So you see, it’s not ruining his life at all. It’s bringing him to the one who loves him the most.”
I turn to look at her, to say something about how delusional she sounds, but before I can speak, I’m transfixed by the look on her face. I’ve never seen anything like it—her lips tilted up in a dreamy smile and her eyes bright with some uncomfortable fire and her cheeks flushed red with excitement. There’s a small tug in the back of my mind, a tug as old as humanity itself, a quiet alarm that says take care, there’s danger, danger from this person. It’s the first time that I’ve truly realized that Abilene is not operating purely out of malice or cold manipulation. There is a fever inside of her, something deep inside of her mind, and whether it was always there or whether it’s only newly developed, I don’t think it matters. It’s tilted her thinking, sent her sliding down paths no human should go down.
She’s beyond being reasoned with. It doesn’t matter what logic I throw at her, what facts I tell her, she will believe this fantasy about Ash above all else. That they’re somehow meant for each other. That his love for me is some kind of aberrant mistake that he’ll realize if only he could see. And she seems blind to the fact that the more she tortures him in the hope that it will drive him to her, the more she pushes him away.
And with a chill that I feel deep under my skin and in my bones, I realize that she could do more than try to kill me by proxy. She really could harm me—and more importantly, she could harm Ash or Embry. She could harm that child nestled inside of her. I no longer believe that there’s anything she wouldn’t do in her wild pursuit of Ash, anything she wouldn’t do in order to punish me for getting to him first.
“And Embry?” I say, trying to betray none of these thoughts, trying to pretend that this conversation hasn’t revealed the slithers and creeps of her mind. “He’s really just a way to punish me? To isolate Ash?”
Abilene tilts her head in something like pity. “You really do love them both, don’t you?”
There’s no point in lying about it, and I don’t want to. “Yes,” I say. “I really do love them both.”
She stands up and tucks her clutch under her arm, sweeping her hair off her shoulder with a smooth shrug. She looks like an ad for high-end maternity clothes, or maybe a socialite, caught in a semi-casual but still glossed-to-perfection moment. “Then I suppose you have your answer. And while you’re pining after Embry, and Ash is missing his best friend, I’ll be there to comfort him. Me.”
She doesn’t know about Ash and Embry, I realize. That’s one secret she couldn’t uncover, and thank God. If she knew that Ash loved Embry as well as me…it would go badly for him. Maybe Embry’s safe for now, at least as safe as anyone can be around Abilene.
So I don’t threaten her as she makes to leave, I don’t say anything provoking. I say what I think she wants to hear so that she’ll leave and go home appeased for the time being, and then I’ll have space to think. Space to fix this.
“You succeeded, you know. Hurting me. Melwas aside, knowing that Embry slept with you—even if it was because you were blackmailing him—cut me deeper than almost anything else you’ve done.” I’m being truthful, and the honesty seems to call to her.
She turns back from the door, and her face is softer, less disquieting than before. She looks genuinely remorseful about something. “Greer, I—well, I think you should know. That night with Embry…” She absent-mindedly touches her belly as she searches for the words. “I wanted to get pregnant. I planned it that way, and if I hadn’t gotten pregnant that month, I would have tried and tried again. If I couldn’t have Ash’s baby, then this seemed like the next best thing.” She looks down at her stomach with a smile, and then back up to me. “I had help from a doctor, because I knew there were a great many things I could make Embry do, but that wasn’t one of them. Embry didn’t know it was me. He was barely even conscious.”
I stand there, stunned and sick, my thoughts racing. “You raped him.”
“If you like,” Abilene says, lifting a shoulder. “I thought I did it rather kindly, as things go. It’s not like I pretended to be you in the dark. It’s not like he has to remember the feeling of betraying you.”
I simply stare. I’m past words, past real thoughts even; my mind is somewhere vacant, someplace where horrors dwell.
