Page 5 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
I open my eyes, looking at myself in the mirror. Silver speckling at my temples, a serious mouth, day-old stubble. A weary ex-soldier. A man who hurts the people he loves and gets hard doing it. I don’t deserve their love. I don’t deserve any of it. How funny that before tonight I never doubted anything about what I deserved, and now…
“Do I have that effect on people?” I ask. “It feels more like I burn people out with my love, like I use them up until they’ve got nothing left. No one who loves me gets a happy ending, have you noticed? Just being close to me infects their lives with tragedy.”
I don’t know why I’m confessing this all to Morgan. She’s one of the people I’ve harmed, a life I’ve ruined simply by existing inside of it. And other than this phone call, we haven’t spoken through anything other than memos and aides since I met Greer. We’re not in the habit of being vulnerable with each other.
“I knew when I met you that it would end in tragedy. And I still wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. Not a single thing.”
There’s an edge of defiance around the cold, steel core of her words, as if she’s daring me to argue. And I take the dare.
“Why, Morgan? What has been the point of any of this? All this…suffering…and for what?”
“What do you want me to say?” she asks. “That every part of your life has been hallmarked by coincidence, that all of this was just an accident?”
Coincidence. Coincidence that the woman I got pregnant happened to be my sister. Coincidence that her stepbrother would be one of the two loves of my life. Coincidence that my father would have been a president too, that his vice president would be my wife’s grandfather.
There can be a lot of coincidences in a man’s life, and yet this is too much.
“No,” I reply. “I don’t want you to say that.”
“Then you have to accept that things have happened the way they’ve happened and that you can’t change the past. There’s only the present.”
“The present,” I murmur. The present when my little prince is running away from me, when my little prince is running against me. The present when I might lose everything. And I might deserve it.
“Maxen, I…” she takes a deep breath. “For what it’s worth, I never doubted that you’d make a good father. You’re a good man. A great man. The best kind of man.”
My fingers are tight around a necklace of Greer’s, my voice is also tight with pain as I answer. I still see Embry’s face. Hear his words.
The difference is that I’m not afraid to do what needs to be done. And I think you are.
“I don’t feel like a great man.”
“If you did, it wouldn’t be true.”
I don’t have an answer to that. It feels both wrong and right, that idea. That great men and women are necessarily filled with doubt and jagged humility.
“You will know what to do,” she says. “About Lyr, about Embry, about Melwas. You will find a way through it.”
“Do you really have such faith in me? You hate me.”
“My faith goes beyond love and hate, Maxen. I may join Embry in running against you and I’ll fight my damnedest to win, but I’ll do it because it’s in my nature. Power and the winning of it. It’s not because I don’t believe you’re a good president or a good man. It’s not because I share the same delusion as Embry that you’re afraid of fighting.”
I let go of Greer’s necklace and stand. “And what do you think I’m afraid of?”
Morgan lets out a dark laugh. “Embry thinks you’ve grown passive, but I know the truth, little brother. You’ve grown so active that it feels like sharks are swimming in your mind. You itch for the fight so much it scares you awake in the middle of the night. You’re not afraid of conflict, you’re afraid of what will happen when you do fight. You’re afraid of yourself. And I think you’re going to unleash a kind of storm this country hasn’t seen in years when your control finally breaks.”
“I won’t let it,” I vow. I couldn’t let it.
“There’s more than one way for your armor to fracture.”
I narrow my eyes, even though I’m staring at a rack of ties and not my sister’s face. “What does that mean?”
“It’s not a threat,” she says. “Just an observation.”
And we’re silent for a moment more before I say, “I should go. About Lyr…”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I recognize that’s all I can ask. I’m sorry, Morgan. For Prague, for Glein, for all of it.”
