Page 95 of American King (New Camelot Trilogy 3)
“God, Ash, no. Fuck.”
“I would give up anything for you, Embry. Just say the word. Kink, the Presidency, even my life—I’d lay it down at your feet if you would only love me like I love you.”
Embry’s head dropped onto our joined hands and I felt his tears, warm as the lake was cold. “It’s not enough,” he mumbled into our hands. “And I made a promise.”
“Is this…is this like last time?” I asked, my voice already going tight with pain. “You’re going to end it between us now, aren’t you?”
“I think it’s for the best,” he whispered.
“I—”
But now the words really were gone, my throat too balled up and watery to speak.
Embry stood up and brushed the rocks off the knees of his pants. “It’s for the best,” he repeated, as if trying to convince himself. “It was fun though, yeah?” He gave me a pained smile. “While it lasted?”
I stared up at him, and I knew he could see all of my pain and I didn’t even have the desire to shield him from it. Let him see it, let him see my hurt, and if he won’t walk away with my ring, maybe he’ll walk away with my pain in his heart and that will be something at least.
“I’ll see you at the house,” Embry said, shoving his hands in his pockets and then setting off across the shore.
Me, I stayed there for a long time, until the fog was gone and the sun hot above, and then I stood up and cocked my arm, ready to throw that hateful ring into the lake where it could never, ever torment me again.
TWENTY-FOUR
ASH
now
“Embry, it’s Ash. I know it’s late…or early, I guess. Greer just told me about Abilene, and I wanted to tell you that if you need anything, I’m here. I love you, little prince.”
I end the call and toss the phone on the table in front of me, Abilene’s death like a millstone around my neck. Even though I don’t regret finally confronting her, I do regret her death. Less for her sake than for Greer and Embry’s, who will have to sift through all the complicated holes her suicide will leave in their lives. For the sake of a little boy named Galahad, who no longer has a mother.
How funny life is, I think, spinning the phone idly on the table with one finger. That both Embry and I should have found ourselves widowed in the crucial moments leading up to an election. And I know exactly the circus it will become. Within an hour or two, the news will be frenzied with it, and Embry will have to give a statement, he will have to perform a grief he might not feel, and it will dog his steps for the rest of the campaign.
At least it means the press will turn their attention away from Lyr.
I stand up and stretch for a moment, looking around my hotel suite, feeling so tired and lonely for a moment that I almost just want to go straight to the airport and fly back home. After speaking with Abilene, Greer and I had both flown out in the dark hours of the morning to separate campaign events, and now I’m in Kansas City having done a rally, a speech, and dinner with my mom, and then spending the remainder of the night restless and alone. When Greer called at four a.m. to say that they’d found Abilene’s body in the Potomac, I gave up on sleep. After making sure my wife was okay, I called Embry, and now here I am, awake and alone in my hometown.
I open my hotel door and call for Luc. “I’d like to go for a drive,” I say.
“Yes, sir,” he says, as if there’s nothing unusual about me wanting to go somewhere in the freezing pre-dawn cold. “Tell me where and we’ll get it ready for you.”
So an hour later, I’m bundled in a coat and scarf and walking through the dark leafy hollows of a nature trail I used to enjoy as a young person. The agents are fanned out around me, but they give me space, and after a while, it almost feels as if I’m alone. Just me and the crisp darkness of early morning, the bright splash of a stream running next to the path.
The water sounds so happy, so lively, so different than the cold Potomac, and I feel a chord of pity for Abilene. She tried to have Greer killed, she blackmailed Embry, she exposed my son to the worst kinds of public censure and ridicule—and yet, I do still pity her. She only knew love as a mangled, mechanical thing, she never knew it for the extraordinary gift from God it is, and for all the times my heart has been broken for this gift, at least I can say I’ve lived with it in abundance.
“I thought you might come here,” a voice says from behind me. I turn to see Merlin, lean and at hom
e in the murky woods. Through the branches, the hazy blue light of dawn casts a net of shadows over his face. The shadows move as he walks towards me, and for a moment, I feel as if I’ve seen this before, as if I’ve dreamed it. Yes, it would have to be a dream, because when I saw it before, he wasn’t wearing a wool coat and a fashionable scarf and even more fashionable glasses. He’d been wearing something else, something ancient, but the net of shadows had been the same, a cold forest that looked much the same as this…and had there been a cave?
How strange.
Just a dream.
“I suppose you’ve heard about Abilene Corbenic?” Merlin asks, interrupting my thoughts.
“I have.”
“A sad thing,” he says, and together we start walking down the path again. “A very sad thing.”
