Chapter 294 See You in the Morning
ELIJAH
I knew the DNA results were coming in the morning and I had made a deliberate choice not to be in the room when they arrived.
Not because I was afraid of what they would say, I had already accepted, in the quiet of the previous night, that the boy was probably mine. The resemblance was too specific to be coincidence and I had learned over the years that hoping something wasn’t true and knowing it wasn’t true were very different positions. I was not in the second position.
I had come home from the hospital when Adriana fell asleep in her chair beside Lana’s crib. She needed rest and she wasn’t going to take it voluntarily, so I had waited until her breathing evened out and then I had driven back to the house to deal with the things that needed dealing with at home.
We had other children and they had questions and I was not going to leave those questions sitting unanswered overnight.
The twins were still awake when I got to their room. I had suspected they would be. They were sitting in their beds, alert and full of energy from boys who had been pretending to be asleep and had given up the pretense the moment they heard the door.
“Dad.” Elijah junior sat up immediately. “We heard the maids talking. They said Lana was found. Why did they say she was found? Mum said she was sick at the hospital.” His eyes narrowed on me curiously.
I sat on the edge of the nearest bed and looked at both of them. “What exactly did the maids say?”
“That she was found in the hallway and a guard brought her to mum.” Liam leaned forward. “Was she lost, dad? We thought she was sick.”
Careless. The staff had been careless and I was going to address that tomorrow but right now I had two small boys looking at me and needing something that felt like truth without the full weight of what the truth actually was.
“She was in the hospital because she got very cold,” I said. “She was found and brought home and then we took her straight to the hospital to get warm. That’s the real story.” I looked at both of them. “She’s being looked after. Mum is with her. She’s going to be okay.”
“When can we see her?” The inconsistency was forgotten and they seemed only eager to see their sister.
“When the doctor says it’s safe for visitors. She needs to be quiet right now.” I reached over and pushed Elijah junior’s hair back from his forehead. “Not long. I promise.”
Elijah junior nodded but I could see him processing it, filing it, deciding how much to believe. He had always been the one who saw through things faster than people expected.
I went to Lorain’s side of the room. She was already lying down and she looked at me when I sat beside her.
“Dad,” she said. “You wouldn’t lie to us, would you?”
I looked at her for a moment. She was too smart for her age. “Not if I can help it,” I said. “But sometimes grown-ups keep parts of a difficult story back until the time is right to tell it. That’s not the same as lying.”
She looked at me with her mother’s eyes. “Lana’s going to be okay though.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is.”
She nodded once, accepting this, and closed her eyes. I stayed until her breathing settled and then I went to find Leo.
His room was dark when I knocked, no light under the door. I thought he was asleep. Then his voice came through, muffled and flat in the way of someone who had been awake for a long time and had stopped caring about how they sounded.
“Come in.”
I pushed the door open. He was in bed but not sleeping, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, his phone face-down on the bedside table. He turned his head when I came in and in the low light I could see that he’d been crying, which he would hate me knowing but which I was going to know anyway.
“Did she wake up?” he asked immediately i stepped in.
The sight of his red rimmed eyes made my heart ache.
It didn’t matter what I said or what Adriana said, he still carried that guilt. And I had no idea how to take it away from him.
“Not yet,” I replied, trying to find something optimistic to share. “But she’s responding. It looks good.”
Leo pressed his lips together. He had been carrying the weight of this since the moment he turned around at that graduation and found her gone, and the weight of it was visible in him right now in a way he usually kept better hidden.
“Is Mum okay?”
“She will be.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I looked at him. “She’s scared and she’s angry and she’s sitting in a hospital chair next to your sister’s crib refusing to move until Lana opens her eyes. So she’s herself, which is the best she could be right now.” I held his gaze. “She doesn’t blame you, Leo. Neither do I. Neither will Lana when she’s old enough to understand any of this.”
He looked at the wall. “I keep replaying it.”
“I know.”
“It doesn’t stop.”
“It will.” I leaned forward. “When she comes home and you can see that she’s okay, it will stop. Until then, you let it play if it needs to play and you remind yourself that it plays on a loop because you love her, not because you failed her.” I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Can you do that?”
He was quiet for a long moment. I almost gave up on hearing a response from him when his soft voice came. “Yeah.”
“Good. The twins and Lorain need you steady tomorrow. They’re frightened even if they’re not saying it loudly. That job falls to you when your mother and I are at the hospital.”
“I know.” He looked at me. “Dad…” he hesitated before saying his next words. “The DNA test.”
“We’re getting the result tomorrow morning.”
“What if it’s positive?”
I looked at my son — my son, the boy I had chosen and who had chosen me, who had grown into exactly the person I would have asked for if I’d been given the ability to ask — and I said what I had already decided.
“It changes nothing about who you are or where you stand,” I said. “That conversation is done. I closed it in front of the Elders and I’m closing it now with you. Your position is yours.”
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he nodded, once, the nod that meant he believed me.
“Goodnight, Dad.”
“Goodnight, son.”
I had a shower and ate something standing at the kitchen counter because sitting down felt like a luxury I hadn’t earned, and then I did the thing I’d been working up to since I got home.
I went to my office and I called Simone.
She appeared in a nightdress that bared more than it covered. Irritation flickered in my chest. I picked up the blanket from the back of my chair and threw it to her before she’d fully crossed the room.
“Cover yourself.”
“It’s not inappropriate if I’m—”
“Cover yourself.” I kept my voice flat. “You’re in my office in my home and you will conduct yourself accordingly. Put it on.”
She held the blanket and didn’t put it on and smiled at me with the smile of someone who believed they still had an angle to work. “I thought you wanted to talk. We can talk much better if you’d just relax, Eli.”
“Elijah,” I said.
“What?”
“My name is Elijah. You’ve been calling me Eli since you arrived. My name is Elijah.”
She blinked. “I always called you Eli.”
“That was when we were seventeen and you barely knew me.” I sat down on the edge of the desk and looked at her directly. “The results come back in the morning. This is your last opportunity to tell me the truth before they do. Is that boy my son?”
She met my eyes and held them for a long time without speaking. Then she straightened.
“I raised him alone for years,” she said, and the performed confidence had shifted into something more real, something that had genuine pain underneath it. “I didn’t know you were the King. By the time I found out who you were and where you were, he was already old enough to ask questions I didn’t have answers to. So yes, I am telling you he is your son, and I am telling you that you spent years not being there for him whether you knew it or not, and I am not going to sit here and be made to feel like I’ve done something wrong by coming to tell you.”
I looked at her for a long moment.
“If the test confirms it,” I said, “we will figure out what that means. But let me be absolutely clear about one thing, whatever it means, it does not involve you and me. It does not involve you having any kind of position in this house or in my life beyond whatever is necessary for the boy. Do you understand me?”
She opened her mouth and I saw something in her expression shift.
“Your wife—” she started.
The door opened before she could finish her sentence.
Adriana was standing in the doorway. Her eyes moved from me to Simone and back to me and I watched her read the room in approximately three seconds with the accuracy she always had and the composure she always chose.
“Adriana,” I said. “I called her here to talk before the results—”
“I heard you,” she said. Her voice was completely even. “You called her to ask her the truth before the results came back. I understood that.” She looked at me steadily. “Are you done?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”
She closed the door and I heard her footsteps moving away down the corridor.
I looked at Simone. “This conversation is finished,” I said. “The guards will walk you back to the annex.”