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“This is my house, and I will not be lied to in it!”
Helena barked out a laugh. “Then you need to fire Nancy, because that woman has been lying to you, too!”
Nancy gasped. “I beg your pardon?”
“Oho!” Evelyn chuckled, clapping her hands together. “Isn’t that a turn up for the books? I’d love to say I’m surprised, but I’m not.”
My footsteps faltered. How could they defend me? Helena, perhaps, but Evelyn? After I’d lied to her?
“Helena, I think it’s best you leave,” the duchess said to her daughter. “Your husband will be home soon and—”
“Hugo,” Helena said, making me squeeze my eyes closed. “Tell her the truth. I know you know it all.”
“Mum.” Hugo’s voice was weak. “She—she’s right.”
“Jesus Christ. Grow a pair.”
“I cannot believe you’d accuse me of lying,” Nancy said, interrupting what I was sure would be a sibling argument. “I would never do—”
“But you have been.” I turned back around and looked at her, and everyone else in the room did the same to me. “Haven’t you? You can stand there and be holier-than-thou, but you’ve been lying longer than I have.”
The duchess looked at me. “I believe I asked you to leave.”
“I’ll leave. Gladly,” I snapped. “But if you want to talk about liars, then I’ll tell you about one. Nancy knew who I was. She knew before I got here. She deleted the email Camilla sent her and claimed it went to her spam when that wasn’t true. Then, when I explained after our meeting, she told me to pretend for the time you were in London until Camilla was scheduled to arrive after the snowstorm in Norway.
“When she didn’t get back because her grandmother passed away, Nancy told me I had to figure it out and continue deceiving everyone or my best friend’s business was on the line. I didn’t even want to be here. I never should have been here.”
Anger bubbled inside me to the point I knew my skin was turning red and I didn’t even care. Adrenaline pumped through my veins at warp speed, and I turned to Camilla.
“I told you to take this job, but you never should have asked me to step in for you. The fact you couldn’t get here isn’t your fault. I would never blame you for that, ever, but you know as well as I do that I should never have been taking your place, and you should have done better checking in when I arrived. It was your job to make sure the message got across that you wouldn’t be the one showing up.”
She let out a slow breath and gave a small jerk of her head, and I knew she knew I was right.
I looked back at the duchess. “And all those mistakes? Those miscommunications? They were all over things that went via Nancy. She was working to actively sabotage Evelyn’s party because she was pissed she didn’t get the job.”
The duchess—actually, fuck that.
Anna.
She didn’t deserve my respect anymore.
Maybe she never had.
Anna’s jaw dropped. “I beg your pardon?”
“She hid my identity from you. The lack of menus in the invitations? She sent them out and didn’t include it in a deliberate act. As soon as the guest list was confirmed I had no say. She never gave either of us Kellie’s details as the baker, so we hired the bakery in the village until Hugo corrected me. She contacted the decorating company and pretended to be my assistant, giving them the wrong floor and seating plan so they didn’t originally ship us enough decorations despite me ordering them. And she would have cancelled the lemon cake for dessert if I hadn’t sat in this very room until past ten o’clock the other night calling every single person involved in this party to make sure all changes were directly communicated to me.”
Anna glared at me, but I caught Nancy taking a step back.
“Yeah. I was a step ahead of you,” I told her. “Nice try, but the chef called me this morning to protest the last-minute change, and I told them it was bullshit.”
Everyone’s eyes were firmly on me.
“Out,” Anna said. “Now.”
“It’ll be my pleasure. I hope you treat Camilla far better than you’ve treated me.” I took a step back and pressed my hand to my stomach. “I might have lied about who I was, but it came from a good place. I didn’t come here intending to deceive anyone. I came here to help my best friend, and the only people who ever bothered helping me were your children.” I glanced at Nancy. “It’s a shame you can’t say the same thing for the people whose job it actually is.”
Hugo stared at me from across the room. His expression was inscrutable, and I held his gaze for a moment before I turned to Camilla.
