365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 14

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 14 -Item One

opened it in front of the King.

One sheet of heavy paper. A woman’s handwriting, elegant, unhurried.

Commander Vale,

My father is old, stupid, and now in a Crown cell, which is where sentimental men belong.

I have no interest in owning you. That was his century’s ambition, not mine.

You should know two things.

One: yours is not the only bloodline that was hunted. Ask your King what happened to the other one-the- one that could hear a lie. Ask him why there is no living record of them. Ask him gently. He was there.

Two: there is a girl, nine years old, in a house in Geneva, who woke up last spring able to do what you do. She is not a Vale. She has no six brothers and no boy with gray eyes and no army.

She has eight years.

What will you do with them, Commander?

Hallow
I read it twice, then set it on the table.

The King had gone absolutely white.

“Your Majesty,” I said. “Is there a second bloodline?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“That,” he said, “is a conversation for a locked room.”

“Then lock one,” I said. “I’ll bring coffee.”

Here’s where I am now.

Nine days later, I stand in a clearing near my family’s western border, wearing a dress the color of a bruise, in front of two hundred people.

They threw the party.

Eleven months of planning, thirteen months late, and my mother did not cut a single item – not the indign not the oxblood, not the ridiculous menu of everything I’ve ever cooked for our House kitchen.

The King came, as a witness, exactly as they’d planned it a year ago. He stood in front of two hundred members of eleven Houses and formally acknowledged Rowan Eleanor Vale, daughter of House Vale, Unit Commander of the Vanguard, and made it clear in the way only kings can that anyone who touches me

touches the Crown.

Cyrus Hallow will never see the outside of a cell.

My six brothers got up one at a time and each told a story about me that made me want to die.

Declan came on crutches to tell the one about the phone. “Hewwo, Boo Wivvel. Who you want?” Two hundred people laughed. I threw a bread roll at his bad leg.

Then my mother stood up with a shoebox.

Eighteen notebooks. One for each year. Every color I ever said I liked, every song, every dumb opinion, in her handwriting, from the year I was born.

“I kept a list,” she said, to a field of two hundred people who could all see her face. “One hundred and forty-one items. My daughter has crossed off a hundred and forty of them herself, which is the most Rowan thing that has ever happened.”

She looked at me.

“Item one,” she said. “She will never doubt for one day that she was wanted.”

Her voice went.

“I failed item one,” my mother said. “I failed it for three hundred and sixty-five days, and I will spend the rest of my life doing it over. Rowan – you were wanted. You were wanted before you existed. Your brother asked for you the day before you arrived and the universe said yes.”

Nobody in that field had a dry face. Including me, and I’ve been shot at.

I’m not going to tell you I forgave them in that moment. I forgave them in pieces, over months, the way you actually forgive people – badly, and backward, and mostly on Sundays at a greasy diner where my mother orders a salad and then eats half my fries.

Here’s what I know.

I’m eighteen. I run seven teams and thirty-five lives. I have a Captain who’s getting married in the spring and a boy with gray eyes who put a ring in his desk drawer three weeks ago and thinks I don’t know, even though I can hear the box when he opens it.