Chapter Twenty-Six #2
Maisie flies to her feet, and before anyone can try to stop her, she sprints out of the room, two red splotches on her cheeks and her blue eyes overflowing with tears.
I give Kit another look, beyond confused now.
But his focus darts between Venetia, Alexander, and Helene and Nicholas, and I can practically see him working out some kind of puzzle in his head.
“Enough,” says Alexander in a quiet, deadly voice. “How I choose to conduct my family’s business is none of yours.”
“Of course it is, when it’s my family, too,” insists Venetia, her volume only rising. “I’ve given up everything—”
“And been highly compensated for it,” says Alexander in that same lethal tone. “Is that what this is about? Money?”
Venetia grits her teeth. “This is about honesty and integrity, and the lies you’ve built your entire reign upon.
If you continue to target my son, then let me make myself perfectly clear—your secrets will no longer be safe with me.
I don’t care what it costs me,” she adds with the kind of defiant bravado that makes it clear she definitely does.
“Maybe it’s finally time that everyone knows what this family has really been up to. ”
With that, she pivots toward the door opposite the one Maisie fled through and walks away, her head held comically high and her back painfully arched. We all watch her go in silence, and it’s only once a footman closes the door behind her that Helene breaks.
“Alexander…” Her voice is thick with unshed tears, and she and Nicholas are both on their feet now.
“I’ll take care of it,” he says heavily, finally sinking down onto the nearest ottoman with my mother’s gentle help. His entire body is trembling, and I stand, like there’s something I can do about it. Like there’s something I can do about any of this when I have no clue what’s going on.
Except as Helene and Nicholas hurry to follow Maisie, I glance at Kit once more, and the look he’s giving me—the wide-eyed, shell-shocked expression of someone whose entire world has just been rocked—makes me pause, and Venetia’s words finally brand my brain like hot steel.
Everyone in this room knows Nicholas should be the rightful heir to the throne, and that my son should be next.
But that would mean skipping over Maisie, which doesn’t make sense.
Does Venetia think that Alexander should’ve never been king?
Because he went to the United States to live with my mother when they were younger?
Because he wasn’t there the day his father died?
Because he intended on abdicating and changed his mind? Or—
Her threats to tell the world. The way Maisie flinched and curled up into herself, like Venetia was about to beat the royal titles right out of her. The tension in my sister’s body, as if she knew what this was all about from the very start.
Because she did know. She knew the moment Venetia showed up without Ben—she had to.
Which means this has everything to do with Maisie. And if Venetia’s implying that Maisie isn’t the rightful heir, and Maisie can’t even bring herself to deny it…
In one roaring instant, everything snaps into place.
The pieces of a puzzle so inconceivable that I’ve never even considered it before.
A possibility so absurd that only Ben would think to test those boundaries and see if they break.
But unlike our accusations against him, all the evidence is there, circumstantial and otherwise.
Maisie isn’t Alexander’s biological daughter. She’s Nicholas’s.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
It’s my turn to gape at my father, and to my surprise, he’s staring at me in return. “Is Venetia right?” I say, my mouth dry and my tongue oddly clumsy. “Is Maisie really…?”
“Maisie is of royal blood,” says Alexander firmly. “Just as you are.”
“But I’m not the next Queen of England,” I say. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I really don’t care about legitimacy or succession or any of that, but—” But Maisie does. And royal blood doesn’t matter when it’s from the wrong person. “Does she know?”
“Yes,” he says, and he takes my mom’s hand, folding it in his. “It was a condition of the agreement Helene, Nicholas, your mother, and I made at the start.”
“That you would—you would raise his kid?” I say, and the room starts to spin. I sit down again next to Kit, who still looks as wild-eyed as I feel. “Wait—is that why you didn’t divorce Helene? Is that why you didn’t abdicate and stay with my mom and—and is that why you weren’t there for me?”
The questions land with a resounding thud, as if I’ve dropped a boulder in the gilded splendor of the white drawing room, and suddenly everything is quiet. Even the crackling of the fire seems to be muted, and my father’s grip on my mom’s hand tightens. “I—”
“It was a choice we all made,” says my mother as Alexander swallows hard and stares at his feet. “And no one is pretending it was easy, Evie.”
“Seems pretty easy to me,” I say, my insides churning like someone’s poured lava down my throat.
“Alexander could’ve left and had us. You two could’ve been together, he could’ve been my dad—my real dad—but instead he chose to stay in a job he hated and raise his brother’s daughter with a woman he didn’t even love, all because—what, because that’s what he was supposed to do?
Because he didn’t want to embarrass himself or admit that his wife cheated on him? ”
“Because I didn’t want to ruin Maisie’s life before it had begun,” says Alexander, and my vision distorts from a potent mixture of hurt and fury.
“What about my life?” I say, my voice ragged. “What about Maisie, sure, but what about me? Did you even remotely consider what my life would be like without you? Or has Maisie always been more important, just because she’s Maisie?”
Alexander shakes his head, his face splotched with red.
“You—at the time, you had your mother and grandmother. And if Helene, Nicholas, and I had gone public with the truth about Maisie, or even part of the truth…Helene wasn’t willing to hide the pregnancy, not when she knew I would never put her through the humiliation of admitting that the baby wasn’t mine. We simply had no real choice.”
“Of course you had a choice,” I snap, and a surge of grief and spite I don’t expect rise within me, nearly choking off my words. “You had a choice, and you chose Maisie and Helene and—this. And you left me and my mom alone.”
“Evie—” says my mother, reaching for me, but I pull away before she can even get close.
“Don’t,” I say, hot tears running down my face. “You let him go. You let him go, even though it meant I wouldn’t have a dad, and we would be alone. And when everything fell apart—when—when you got sick—”
My throat closes, and I can’t finish, but I don’t need to.
We all know what happened next. When my mom got sick and lost custody of me, I had no one but my grandma.
And when my grandma died, I had no one at all.
The entire time, I could’ve had someone—I could’ve had a father, a family, and my mom wouldn’t have felt like she had to send me away to boarding school.
I would’ve had something solid, something real, something permanent instead of a desperate yearning I kept locked away and refused to acknowledge out of the fear that it would only make the pain worse.
I could’ve felt loved. I could’ve felt safe, and like I really belonged somewhere, to someone.
But instead I spent my entire childhood and teenage years in a constant state of uncertainty and fear of ever getting too close to anyone, knowing damn well that if I did, they would disappear soon enough.
People aren’t permanent. Or they weren’t, before Kit.
Before London. Before my father. But even he didn’t want to be my dad, despite the fact that all he had in England was a family that wasn’t his and a life he didn’t want.
It doesn’t matter that he loves my mom more than anything.
He didn’t love me enough. He didn’t want me enough.
And somehow, knowing that he could’ve been there—that it was his choice all along, and he’d chosen to stay in England—it hurts so much more than when I thought I was nothing to him at all.
“I didn’t let him go,” says my mom, stepping toward me slowly, her hand hovering halfway between us, like she knows I’ll bolt if she tries to touch me. “We stayed together for as long as we could, sweetheart. And if I hadn’t gotten sick—”
“But you did,” I say brokenly, forcing the words past the knot in my throat, and I refocus on Alexander. “And you still weren’t there.”
“Because Betty, your grandmother—” he begins, but I’ve already heard his excuses.
“I don’t care. I would’ve done anything to be there for either of you no matter what my grandma said.
You made that choice. Before, I could understand, since you had Maisie here and couldn’t exactly walk away.
But now…” I shake my head. He still couldn’t have walked away, not when the entire world thought Maisie was his.
But he could’ve done something instead of ignoring me all those years, and I wipe my cheeks, furious and spiraling as everything I thought was solid turns to smoke, giving me nothing to hold on to anymore.
“Ev…” Kit brushes his fingers against my elbow in a gentle question. I don’t pull away, even though my skin crawls at the thought of being touched right now. But it’s Kit. Even if I can count on no one else, at least I can count on him.
“Can we go?” I say, my eyes welling up again, and the look he gives me is so full of pity that I want the earth to swallow me whole.
“Of course,” he says, and he wraps an arm around my shoulders and leads me toward the door.
My mom and Alexander say nothing, and I’m grateful.
This isn’t something a few apologies and excuses will fix.
The foundation of my entire life has shattered, and I have no idea how to put the pieces back together—or if I’ll ever be able to trust either of them again.