Chapter 296 Welcome Home Sign
ELIJAH
I was in my office early.
Hazel found me there when she came looking, and she came in and closed the door and stood across from me with the expression she wore when she had something to say that she was choosing the framing for.
“She saw you last night,” she said. “With Simone.”
“I know.”
Hazel looked at me steadily. “She said she understood what she saw. That Simone staged it deliberately. She wasn’t angry at you.”
I pressed my hand against my desk. “I know that too. But it doesn’t matter whether she was angry or not. It happened in her house and she saw it and that sits somewhere regardless of what she says about it.” I stood up and moved to the window. “Simone is getting exactly what she came here for. Shaos. Every day she’s in this house, she generates something that costs us something.”
“The DNA results come in an hour.”
“I know.” I had been sitting with that fact since I woke up. The knowing and the formal confirmation were different things, and I had already accepted the knowing, but the formal confirmation was going to happen in front of the Elders and it was going to produce a reaction I couldn’t fully control and I needed to be ready for it.
“What will you do?” Hazel said. “If it’s positive.”
“Acknowledge it. Find a way to do right by the boy without letting it touch Leo’s position.” I turned back from the window. “The boy has done nothing wrong. He grew up without a father because of circumstances that were nobody’s fault but which happened nonetheless, and I’m not going to take that out on him.” I paused. “But Simone. She was sent here. Someone told her exactly how to arrive, when to arrive, what to say to the Elders. She didn’t engineer this alone.”
Hazel nodded slowly. “Adriana thinks the same thing.”
“I know she does.” I straightened my jacket. “Has she said anything about the fingerprint results?”
“Inconclusive. Roy’s working on the envelope.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
“She told me to tell you she was going to tell you when she had something concrete.” Hazel held my gaze. “She’s protecting you from the uncertainty. That’s what she does.”
I looked at her for a moment. “What’s she like this morning? At the hospital.”
“She’s watching Lana and thinking about the person behind the letter. She’s two things at once right now and managing both.” Hazel paused. “She told me nothing gets decided in that courtroom today without her in it.”
“She’s right.”
“I told her you already knew.”
“She told you to tell me anyway.”
The Elders were assembled and Simone was already seated, dressed more formally today in a way that told me she’d been given advance notice that the results were coming, which raised a question about who had told her.
The boy — her son, my son possibly — sat beside her with the same closed-off posture he’d had since arriving, and I looked at him properly for the first time since the courtroom.
He was looking at the floor. He seemed uncomfortable with where he was and what was happening around him. He had Simone’s coloring but the bone structure was mine, and the set of his shoulders was familiar in a way I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.
The doctor came in and presented the report.
“The DNA analysis confirms that the King is the biological father of the boy.”
Everything else was pretty much a blur to me.
I stood up.
“The court is adjourned.” I kept my voice even. “No ruling will be made today and no ruling will be made without the Queen present. We reconvene tomorrow morning.”
Adriana was standing at the window of Lana’s room. She hadn’t said anything for a while and I didn't try to fill the silence either.
So when she spoke, I convinced myself it was my mind playing tricks.
“Are you okay?” she asked again.
The question caught me slightly off guard. “I should be asking you that.”
“You should be, but I asked first.” She looked at me steadily. “You found out you have a son you didn’t know about. That’s something. Even if you’re handling it quietly, it’s something.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “I’m trying to figure out what it means,” I cleared my throat, “to have a son I’ve never known who’s already been growing up for years without me knowing.”
She looked at Lana in the crib. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For this whole situation. I know it’s not yours to be sorry for but I feel sorry for you in it.”
“Adriana—”
“I mean it. You didn’t know. You were seventeen and you didn’t know and now you’re sitting in a hospital room next to your daughter who’s in a coma while the Elders debate your succession and there’s a strange boy in your house who is technically your son.” She turned back to me. “That’s a lot. It’s okay for it to be a lot.”
I looked at my wife — at this woman who had run my kingdom for seven months and found a kidnapper and dismantled a conspiracy and was still finding space to acknowledge what this cost me — and I understood again, the way I kept understanding it in new terms, exactly who I had married.
“She moved her hand,” Adriana said, her voice barely above a whisper.
I looked at the crib.
“Earlier this morning, while I was talking to her. I was telling her about the twins’ welcome home sign — apparently they’ve been working on it in secret — and her hand moved. Just slightly. But it moved.”
I looked at Lana. At the small closed fist resting at the edge of the blanket.
“Come home,” I said quietly, to my daughter. “Your brothers made you a sign.”
Adriana made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “We deal with the courtroom tomorrow. Tonight we sit here and wait for her.”
“Yes,” I said.
I reached across and took her hand and she let me hold it, and we sat in the quiet of the room together.
With my wife. Beside my daughter. I wasn’t going to let anything or anyone ruin this.