Triplets Make Five

I had made it through the first half of the stack by the time I needed to take a break to refill my wine glass. I checked my phone, then reminded myself again that I blocked Caleb’s number, and I reached for the next book.

Maybe it was because Caleb was still lingering on my mind, but when I see Emmy’s curly handwriting on the cover of the storybook, my heart instinctively leapt in my chest.

I considered moving the storybook to the bottom of the stack, but then I convinced myself that it was better to tear off the band aid and deal with it then. I took a deep breath and dropped the book onto my lap.

‘The Tale of the Lost Queen,’ the cover read, in squiggly magic market letters.

I don’t remember this fairytale… I thought, frowning as I flipped open the cover.

The first page was an elaborate colored pencil drawing of spindly grey buildings, stretched to comical proportions in front of a bright blue sky. In the center of the page, there was a girl with yellow crayon hair and a bright pink crown.

‘Once upon a time,’ the text began on the first page, ‘in the faraway kingdom of Manhattan, there lived a special princess named Emmy.’

I felt my heart thump. This wasn’t the storybook I assigned to Emmy. In fact, this wasn’t a storybook at all. This was a recreation. Someone reprinted their own story, painstakingly following the format of the storybooks I had assigned so that it would look identical to the other projects. Someone had written their own fairytale, replacing the one I had originally assigned to Emmy. And the flutter in my stomach told me that that someone was Caleb Preston.

I flipped the page and found another rendering of the girl in the crown, this time accompanied by an impossibly tall man wearing a matching pink crown and an impressive attempt at a grey suit.

‘One day Princess Emmy was sent to live with her uncle, King Caleb, in a strange place called Camden Castle.’

Flip.

‘King Caleb loved Princess Emmy very much, but he had never taken care of a special little princess before, and he needed a little bit of help.’

Flip.

‘Luckily there was a very kind and beautiful woman named Daisy who was willing to help him.’

Flip.

‘Princess Emmy adored Daisy, and soon King Caleb did, too. Camden Castle began to feel like a home for the first time.’

I flipped the page and my eyes froze on an illustration of the tall king in the grey suit and pink crown, Caleb, embracing a woman with flowing blonde hair and a blue Bellamy Day polo shirt, me.

‘The truth was, King Caleb had been living a dark and lonely life at Camden Castle. Princess Emmy and Daisy brought color and light into his life, and the king realized that he had finally found his Queen.’

Flip.

‘King Caleb hoped that Daisy would be his queen so they could be a family and live happily ever after… but then something terrible happened.’

Flip; the page was shaded entirely black with crayon, and in the center there was a gnarly depiction of a dragon exhaling glitter-paint plumes of fire.

‘King Caleb was confronted by a terrible monster.’

Flip.

‘The king knew that the monster would hurt the people that he loved the most. So, in order to protect his beloved queen, the king lied. He told the monster that Daisy was just a teacher.’

Flip.

‘The king had told the lie to protect his queen from the terrible monster, but Daisy was hurt. She ran away, before the king could explain himself.’

I flipped to the next page, where King Caleb was speared by his sword, his face twisted in agony.

‘King Caleb realized that he had lost the only woman he had ever loved. Without his queen, the family was incomplete…’

Flip.

‘King Caleb vowed to never stop searching for his lost queen.’