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Do you suppose the king happily looked the other way while Queen Frederica swanned off with a stolen baby?he’d asked, and God help her, but she could still see the contempt on his face. It still ricocheted inside of her, scarring wherever it touched.
And it was still a very good question.
One afternoon she locked herself in Valentina’s bedroom, pulled out her mobile and punched in her mother’s number from memory.
Natalie and her mother weren’t close. They never had been, and while Natalie had periodically wondered what it might be like to have the mother/daughter bond so many people seemed to enjoy, she’d secretly believed she was better off without it. Still, she and Erica were civil. Cordial, even. They might not get together for holidays or go off on trips together or talk on the phone every Sunday, but every now and then, when they were in the same city and they were both free, they had dinner. Natalie wasn’t sure if that would make pushing Erica for answers harder or easier.
“Mother,” she said matter-of-factly after the perfunctory greetings—all with an undercurrent of some surprise because they’d only just seen each other a few months back in Barcelona and Natalie wasn’t calling from her usual telephone number—were done. “I have to ask you a very serious question.”
“Must you always be so intense, Natalie?” her mother asked with a sigh that only made her sound chillier, despite the fact she’d said she was in the Caribbean. “It’s certainly not your most attractive trait.”
“I want the truth,” Natalie forged on, not letting her mother’s complaint distract her. Since it was hardly anything new. “Not some vague story about the evils of some or other Prince Charming.” Her mother didn’t say anything to that, which was unusual. So unusual that it made a little trickle of unease trail down Natalie’s back...but what did she have to fear? She already knew the answer. She’d just been pretending, all this time, that she didn’t. “Is your real name Frederica de Burgh, Mother? And were you by chance ever married to King Geoffrey of Murin?”
She was sitting on the chaise in the princess’s spacious bedroom with the laptop open in front of her, looking at pictures of a wan, very unsmiling woman, pale with copper hair and green eyes, who had once been the Queen of Murin. Relatively few pictures existed of the notorious queen, but it really only took one. The woman Natalie knew as Erica Monette was always tanned. She had dark black hair in a pixie cut, brown eyes and was almost never without her chilly smile. But how hard could it be, for a woman who didn’t want to be found or connected to her old self, to cut and dye her hair, get some sun and pop in color contacts?
“Why would you ask such a thing?” her mother asked.
Which was neither an answer nor an immediate refutation of her theory, Natalie noted. Though she thought her mother sounded a little...winded.
She cleared her throat. “I am sitting in the royal palace in Murin right now.”
“Well,” Erica said after a moment bled out into several. She cleared her throat, and Natalie thought that was more telling than anything else, given that her mother didn’t usually do emotions. “I suppose there’s no use in telling you not to go turning over rocks like that. It can only lead to more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Explain this to me,” Natalie whispered, because it was that or shout, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to give in to that urge. She wasn’t sure she’d stop. “Explainmy lifeto me. How could you possibly have taken off and gone on to live a regular life with one of the King’s children?”
“I told him you died,” her mother said matter-of-factly. So matter-of-factly, it cut Natalie in half. She couldn’t even gasp. She could only hold the phone to her ear and sit there, no longer the same person she’d been before this phone call. Her mother took that as a cue to keep going, once again sounding as unruffled as she always did. “My favorite maid took you and hid you until I could leave Murin. I told your father one of the twins was stillborn and he believed it. Why wouldn’t he? And of course, we’d hid the fact that I was expecting twins from the press, because Geoffrey’s mother was still alive then and she thought it was unseemly. It made sense to hide that there’d been a loss, too. Geoffrey never liked to show a weakness. Even if it was mine.”
A thousand questions tracked through Natalie’s head then. And with each one, a different emotion, each one buffeting her like its own separate hurricane. But she couldn’t indulge in a storm. Not now. Not when she had a charity event to attend in a few short hours and a speech to give about its importance. Not when she had to play the princess and try her best to keep what was left of Valentina’s life from imploding.
Instead, she asked the only question she could.
“Why?”
Erica sighed. And it occurred to Natalie that it wasn’t just that she wasn’t close to her mother, but that she had no idea who her mother was. And likely never would. “I wanted something that was mine. And you were, for a time, I suppose. But then you grew up.”
Natalie rubbed a trembling hand over her face.
“Didn’t it occur to you that I would find out?” she managed to ask.
“I didn’t see how,” Erica said after a moment. “You were such a bookish, serious child. So intense and studious. It wasn’t as if you paid any attention to distant European celebrities. And of course, it never occurred to me that there was any possibility you’d run into any member of the Murinese royal family.”
“And yet I did,” Natalie pushed out through the constriction in her throat. “In a bathroom in London. You can imagine my surprise. Or perhaps you can’t.”
“Oh, Natalie.” And she thought for a moment that her mother would apologize. That she would try, however inadequately, to make up for what she’d done. But this was Erica. “Always so intense.”
There wasn’t much to say after that. Or there was, of course—but Natalie was too stunned and Erica was too, well,Ericato get into it.
After the call was over, Natalie sat curled up in that chaise and stared off into space for a long time. She tried to put all the pieces together, but what she kept coming back to was that her mother was never going to change. She was never going to be the person Natalie wanted her to be, whether Natalie was a princess or a secretary. None of that mattered, because it was Erica who had trouble figuring out how to be a mother.
And in the meantime, Natalie really, truly was a princess, after all. Valentina’s twin with every right to be in this castle. It was finally confirmed.
And Rodolfo still isn’t yours,a small voice inside her whispered.He never will be, even if he stops hating you tomorrow. Even if he shows up for his wedding, it won’t be to marry you.
She let out a long, hard breath. And then she sat up.
It took a swipe of her finger to bring up the string of texts Valentina still hadn’t answered.
It turns out we really are sisters,she typed.Maybe you already suspected as much, but I was in denial. So I asked our mother directly. I’ll tell you that story if and when I see you again.
