Page 58 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
***
IN SOME WAYS, I should be grateful that it took Abilene so long to unleash the truth. It didn’t haunt my last two years in office, and with that freedom, I managed to get almost everything on my ambitious list done. Merlin told me it wasn’t possible, practically dared me, in fact, but here I am two years later, triumphant. Even if I lose this election, there will be no undoing so much of work. This country is safer, smarter, and richer—and that would not be true if the scandal about Lyr had been hanging over my head.
In other ways, I’m not grateful at all. For this to happen two days before the first debate is not ideal timing, which is surely what Abilene intended. Wholesale destruction and distraction.
But mostly, I’m worried for Lyr. Despite the election, Morgan still hasn’t given me permission to meet my son, she still hasn’t told him the truth. I’ve begged and cajoled, reasoned and pleaded, but she’s been adamant that she doesn’t want him to know. And I recognize that it’s not only about me—if I confess my paternity to him, she’ll be forced to explain her maternity, and there’s no doubt that it will sting very much for him to learn that his mother gave him up as an infant, even if she remained nominally in his life as a cousin.
What t
hat means now, however, is that Lyr is learning it all from the news instead of from us, publicly instead of privately, which was just as I feared.
Fuck.
I do the fishing talk, I do the rally. The reporters are relentless, and I can see the questions on the faces of the people I meet with. Is it true? Is it real? Can I really be Penley Luther’s son and the sister of Morgan Leffery and the father of some incestuous love child?
Merlin tells me on the phone to say nothing, as does Trieste, so I say nothing about Lyr or Morgan, I stick to the topics at hand. Belvedere hustles me through my events, and then I’m sitting next to Greer on Air Force One, clenching a warm glass of scotch in my hand as the plane streaks through the dark to Seattle.
Seattle, because I’m not waiting any more. Because I deserve to look my son in the eye and explain everything.
Not for the first time, I think of Embry and his son. Even with as little as I watch the news, there’s been no escaping the photographs of the little boy, the video clips of them playing together in the leaves or running after the family dog. And there’s every order of jealous hurt inside me as I think of Embry as a father—mostly because I’d dreamed for so many years of us being fathers together, and now here we are, each with sons we love but didn’t plan for. How much I want all those moments I missed with Lyr, and how much I want all the moments I missed watching Embry become a parent. I missed his eyes as he held his child for the first time, I missed the awe and the wild happiness and the exhaustion and the worry.
There’s now a part of Embry entirely separate from me, a part of him that was born alongside his son, and perhaps it stings so much because that part of me never had a chance to be born at all. I not only missed Embry becoming a father, but I missed it myself as well.
“Sir.” Belvedere comes up, looking apologetic. “It’s Berlin. Should I say it’s a bad time?”
Berlin. Shit.
All I want to do is drink and run my fingers through my wife’s hair. All I want is to have just an hour to think about what’s waiting for me in Seattle, to think about what I’m going to say to my son when I have the chance.
But I never say no to a call from Berlin. The calls are rare enough as they are, and the week after next will be the keystone in the plan we’ve built over the last two and a half years. And I’ve built it too fucking carefully and slowly to let something like a personal crisis tear through it now.
I hold out my hand for the phone.
“Hello?” I greet.
“Guten Abend,” goes the voice on the other end. And then we get to work.
***
“I WISH you would have given me more time,” Morgan says tersely, tightening the belt on her trench coat as she, Greer, and I walk up the stairs of Vivienne Moore’s intimidating lake house. It’s near midnight, and the house gleams pale and otherworldly in the gloom, the lake behind it shimmering with secrets. “It’s a school night, and he needs his sleep.”
“Do you really think he’s sleeping?” I ask her, my voice just as short as hers. “Tonight? After what people have been saying about him online and on the news all day?”
“You don’t know a fucking thing about him,” she hisses in response, “and you have no right to tell me what you think he’s doing or why you think he’s doing it.”
Next to me, Greer stiffens in anger, but before she can defend me, the door is opening and Vivienne Moore, Governor of the state of Washington and the mother of two of my ex-lovers, is standing in the doorway. “He’s in the library,” she says, giving me a regal nod. “My sister Nimue is in there with him. They’re waiting for you.”
I let out a shaky breath, and Morgan does the same, and even though this election stretches between us, along with years of fighting and bitterness, when we look at each other all I can see is the green-eyed girl who once asked me to hold her wrist instead of her hand. The dark-haired woman who’d dragged me to Lyonesse after Jenny’s death and forced me to find myself again.
Her earlier rancor has slipped into nervousness, and she offers me an unsteady smile. “Well?”
“Yeah,” I say, with an answering unsteady smile, and then we all go inside.
Vivienne leads us to through the impressive house to the library, and there Greer stops and gives me a reassuring kiss. “I’ll be just out here,” she says softly, her hand gentle and warm against my jaw. “If you need me.”
I search her face.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come in with us?” I ask, secretly hoping she’ll say yes, even though I know it would probably less overwhelming for Lyr to have fewer people in the room. But I selfishly want my angel in there, I selfishly want her in there for me, to comfort and hold me. But we had talked about it on the plane here from Portland, after I’d made the decision that I was seeing Lyr tonight at all costs. It had been Greer’s idea to give Morgan and me privacy with our son, and it was a good one.
