Page 4 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“No.”
“No?”
“What good will it do? You think we’re fucked up, just from sleeping with each other? Imagine what he’ll feel like knowing that’s where he came from!”
“And if Abilene Corbenic makes good on her threat and reveals it anyway? Which is worse, him learning it from us or learning it from the internet?”
“Maxen, everything I’ve built has been to protect Lyr. After I learned the truth about us, that protection became more crucial than ever. Even my ex-husband Lorne didn’t know about him.”
I move away from the window and into my bedroom, taking a moment to straighten my well-thumbed Bible on the end table before I wander into the dressing room. There’s a small picture on the vanity of me as child with Althea and Kay. I have no pictures of Imogen Leffey. God knows I wouldn’t have to search the White House too hard to find a portrait of Penley Luther, although I’d rather not.
“My real parents were kept a secret from me too,” I say finally. “It didn’t make it any easier to learn it at thirty-six than it would have been to learn it at fourteen.”
“I don’t want him to carry that burden at all,” she says. “Can’t you see that? It’s better that he never know.”
Then I’ll never know him, a selfish part of me cried. God, how much I’ve wanted a child to hold and raise and love, and now I find I already have a son of my own, unfolding into manhood, and the idea of not knowing him ever slices at me.
But it’s not only about my selfish need to know him, I recognize that. It’s about what’s best for him, and while I disagree with Morgan that it’s better for him to believe the lies he’s been told since birth, I don’t disagree with her so strongly that I can’t understand her concern.
“I see that too,” I say. “But please see it the way I do. I’ve already committed enough sins…I don’t want to compound them by lying. I don’t want to miss any more of my son’s life.”
A pause.
I’m sitting down at the vanity now, toying with Greer’s necklaces, running my fingertips over slender chains and delicate pendants.
“I’ll think about it,” Morgan says eventually. “It’s not a promise. But I’ll…I’ll think about it.”
I close my eyes, trying to make myself think like a president again. Like a solider. And not like a man who’s just been gutted by his best friend and lover. “We have to prepare ourselves too, Morgan. If Abilene goes public about Lyr, that necessarily means the world will know about us. About what happened between us.”
“Right,” she says, her voice once again climbing into her crisp Senator’s tones. Scandal and spin. This she knows, this she is comfortable with. “I can have my Chief of Staff liaison with Kay and Trieste, talk through a coordinated approach to media defense.”
“Kay won’t be my Chief of Staff much longer,” I say, glancing over at the picture of us as kids.
“Why on Earth not?” Morgan sounds irritated. “She’s the best person you’ve got on your team.”
“Which is why I’m appointing her Vice President,” I explain, a little impatiently. “Or did you forget that Embry is quitting the White House and planning to run against me?”
“Oh,” she says. “That.”
“You two will make a great team.”
“As will you and Kay,” she concedes.
“It makes a nice symmetry. A brother and sister on each side.”
“And a brother and sister opposing each other,” she says and gives a small laugh, and for a moment, I remember Prague. I wonder what life would have been like if I’d met her as a sibling, if we could have loved each other as a brother and sister should do, instead of…well.
Her laugh turns into another sigh. “It was Embry who told you about Lyr, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He wanted so badly to protect you from the truth. To protect Lyr and me from exposure. He must have been very angry with you to change his mind.”
Behind my eyelids I see his face in the office again, wildflower-blue eyes full of pain, lines of fury and resentment around his mouth and creasing his forehead.
“I think he hates me.”
“Maybe,” Morgan agrees. “But he’ll never stop loving you. You have that effect on people.”
