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“If you’ve fallen in love with me Derrick,” she says and I stop short. “If you’ve really fallen in love with me, then…I can’t keep this to myself any longer.”
What the fuck is this? I actually put my towel down and sit down on the bed.
“You need to know the truth,” Daphne says and hands me her tablet as well.
I look through it. The headline is from the St. Livy Register - the newspaper of record in my kingdom. It simply reads, “Queen Dies From Drug Overdose in New York.”
I look up at Daphne. “What the fuck is this?” I ask, my heart starting to beat.
She looks at me firmly. “The truth,” she says. “Read.”
And read I fucking do.
It rocks my fucking world.
My mother never had cancer. She had several, and I’m talking about upwards of ten times she checked into rehab for drugs. For alcohol.
Article after article. Government records. Foreign newspapers and gossip columns. All painting a picture far more different than I ever knew.
My parents being married in an arranged marriage. My mother getting caught cheating on my father, the King at least five times. Her struggles with alcoholism. Her passing out drunk and high at state functions. Embezzlement of monies from the Royal Treasury. Being picked up in Amsterdam in the Red Light District - high on methamphetamines.
Finally, internal documents that were declassified by the St. Livy Royal Office showing my father taking my mother for treatment all around the world. Taking her to St. Penares for therapy. To Australia to get away from the press. And finally to bring her to New York City for intensive therapy - after a particularly heinous episode where she was caught fucking two guys in the Royal Palace with cocaine in her system and a Blood Alcohol Level around 0.15.
Apparently New York City was the last straw. A sum of $2.5 million dollars was found to have been embezzled by my mother and the Parliament of St. Livy had demanded that the King do something about his wayward wife or abdicate the throne until the matter was resolved.
Rather than throw his country into chaos, he brought her to treatment here.
But it didn't work.
I read a News of the Times article that talks about how the Queen of St. Livy was checked into rehab and left one night. She went partying, and died of alcohol poisoning and a drug overdose.
The heroin was too pure apparently.
Pictures of my father at the funeral. Despite everything that she’d done to him - all the times he could have divorced her - he stayed by her side until she took her life. I look at shots of my father, his head bowed and sad, holding me.
“Where did you get all this?” I ask Daphne, awed that she could put this all together. “How did you get all this?”
“I’ve been digging Derrick,” she says. “You talk about your father so much, but he doesn’t deserve your hate. He deserves…”
I don’t let her finish. “Sympathy,” I say out loud.
Oh my fucking God. What the fuck have I done? All my father wanted was to preserve for me the sweet and innocent image of my mother that I had. He let me continue thinking that. He let me stay angry at him. He let me turn into the prodigal son, the embarrassment to the throne. Everything I ever did to hurt him, he took without question because he wanted me to have a mother.
And I twisted it, to where he no longer had a son.
Daphne coms over and wraps her arms around me.
Fuck, I’ve never cried in my life. But if there were any time that I would, now would be it.
I look over at my angel.
She looks at me as she speaks. “I love you, Derrick Blaine,” she says to me, a single tear falling from her eye.
I smile, wiping it away with my fingers. “I love you, Daphne Apple,” I say back to her. “God, I fucking love you so much.”
We kiss. It seems like forever and I don’t want it to end. I want that fucking moment to stay for all fucking time.
But eventually she pulls away and looks at me with a wan smile. “I think it’s time you made a phone call,” she says.
