now

When Embry Moore leaves a room, the air changes. The molecules of oxygen and nitrogen and argon rearrange themselves into something stale and listless, something only barely life giving. You can drag in lungful after lungful and never get enough, because it’s not enough. There’s not enough to fill your chest and push into your blood. Systems start shutting down. The world goes static-filled and dim.

And now here I am, each breath grating in and out, bringing me no relief, no mercy. Because I am alone, and everything I’ve ever done wrong has made sure that Embry will never breathe the same air as me again.

That’s not even the worst part.

No, the worst part is learning that I’ve never breathed the same air as my son.

Greer is away, Embry is gone, and I have a son.

Whom I’ve never met.

Whose mother is my sister.

Fuck.

I scrub my hands over my face, over the hair that Embry kissed not ten minutes ago. I try to breathe again, try to stop the way my ribs keep jerking with choked sobs, try to stop the tears burning their way past my eyelids. It hurts, my entire body hurts, my chest, my throat, my eyes. I’ve been carved up and I’m bleeding out.

I slide out of the chair I’m sitting in, right onto the floor of my study, pressing my face into the carpet, and I cry. For a young man named Lyr that I’ve never met. For Embry, pressed by Merlin to refuse my love, pressed by Abilene to hurt Greer in order to protect me. Pressed by his own conscience to fight me at long last.

I cry for Greer, because she’s not here, because she doesn’t know, because I don’t know how she’ll look at me when she learns that I got my own sister pregnant.

How could I not know?

I roll onto my back, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. It’s all there behind my eyelids—the fires at Glein, that fateful village during the war. Morgan’s limp form as I carried her out of the church. My child was inside her then, saved from incineration by moments, by luck. If he’d died, it would have been my fault.

And all these years—how can my son ever forgive me for all these years apart? How can I ever forgive myself?

There’s more. Embry breaking and betraying me…but broken and betrayed himself.

Greer, with new shadows in her eyes, publicly shamed and taken by force when I couldn’t protect her.

Everyone I’ve failed. Embry and Greer. Lyr and Morgan. Countless others…soldiers and civilians, American citizens and Carpathian villagers. The line of people I’ve let down is numberless, and I have no one to blame but myself.

I stay there for a long time, stretched out on the floor, my hands pressing into my eyes until the tears stop and I see stars. I can’t remember the last time I’ve cried this hard. I can’t remember ever feeling this lonely, this alone. This…rudderless.

What am I supposed to do? When the man who is supposed to love me hates me? When I can’t protect the woman we both love? When I have a son?

What am I supposed to do?

* * *

“Morgan.”

Her name from my lips results in silence on the other end of the line. Finally Senator Morgan Leffey speaks. “Mr. President.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” my sister asks in a tired voice. “Be respectful?”

“Put distance between us.” I close my eyes and think of Prague. Not with lust, obviously. But with a sort of fondness. She’d been the first lover to show me what I needed, both that time and then again after Jenny’s death. Even when she hated me, she’d still helped me.

I couldn’t discount the debt I owed her for that. Not in the face of this new, terrible debt.

“Why are you calling, Maxen?” she asks. “Is this about the V.A. overhaul? Because I told you that my committee won’t budge on—”

I interrupt her. “It’s about Lyr, Morgan,” I say. “It’s about our son.”

I hear a small intake of breath, then careful stillness. “Who told you?” Morgan asks, in a voice of glass pretending to be stone. “You weren’t ever supposed to know.”

“That’s not true though, is it?” I’m walking around the empty Residence feeling just as empty as the rooms. “You wanted to tell me once. Before Glein.”

“Yes,” she admits. “Before Glein.”

I rub at the spot in my chest where my heart used to be, before Embry tore it out. “Fuck knows you don’t owe me anything Morgan, but why? Why couldn’t I have known?”

“I thought it made us even. You left me to die, and I hid the new life we made from you. It seemed fair at the time.”

“And now?”

Morgan lets out a breath, and I can picture her running her thumb along her forehead, just like I do when I’m thoughtful or stressed or sorrowful. “And now I don’t know.”

“I grew up thinking I had a father who didn’t care about me. And then you told me the truth about my parents at Jenny’s funeral, and I knew for a fact that my father didn’t care about me. All I ever wanted was not to do that…not to be that. And now that’s what you’ve made me. The same kind of man.”

Morgan’s voice is sharp when she answers. “You want to pout about not having a father? What about my mother, Maxen? The one you killed when you were born? You think I don’t miss her? That I wasn’t scarred or lost or damaged knowing that she’d gone to bed with a man who wasn’t my father and ended up dying because of it?”

“Dammit, Morgan, do you think I don’t know that? That I don’t feel her loss too? That I don’t feel the karmic weight of being born under such a fucking cloud?”

“Don’t try that with me. You had Althea. You had a mother. I only ever had Governor Vivienne Moore, and even as stepmothers go, she was fucking cold. My father was a husk. I grew up alone.”

“You had Embry,” I point out.

“You had Kay,” she retorts.

I stop at the window in the dining room, looking out on the night-dark lawn. Past the fence, headlights and taillights move through the District’s streets, lamplights glow, window squares of yellow light point to where the brightest minds of Washington are burning the midnight oil on policy and lobbying and diplomacy. “This is pointless,” I say. “This who-had-it-worse game.”

She sighs. “Fine. But you have to understand why I wanted something different for Lyr. Vivienne suggested Nimue raise him instead, and Nimue is happy and kind and undamaged. She’s not like us, Maxen. There’s no stain on her. And I knew she’d be a better parent than either of us.”

I listen to her. To the pain in her voice. And something in me cracks. “Was it hard? To give him to Nimue?”

She lets out a noise that should be a laugh but sounds like a sob. “There isn’t a word for how hard it was. When he was born, he was so, so quiet, and so stoic, like you. He didn’t even cry when I put him in Nimue’s arms. He just looked at me, resigned and silent. Like he’d been waiting for me to let him down all along.”

There’s silence for a long time, for both of us. Each of us lost in our own pain.

“I want to tell him, Morgan. I want to meet him.”

“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.”

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.”

“It’s too late to—”

“Maybe it is too late. But I want you to know anyway. There’s not a night that goes by that Glein doesn’t haunt my dreams…that the whole fucking war doesn’t weigh on me. I failed you that day. I didn’t mean to, I was trying my hardest, but I still failed. I’m still responsible, and I’ll never forgive myself for it. Especially now, knowing about our son.”

Morgan is quiet when she speaks. “Okay, Maxen.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” she affirms.

“Thank you.”

“Good night, little brother.”

“Good night, Morgan.”