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“Simple things feel so much harder now,” I said to her gently.
“You need to be careful with that grandmother of theirs. If you aren’t firm, she will steamroll you,” she said back.
“What exactly am I supposed to do? Ask her to stop talking?”
“You are Queen, Odette.”
“That doesn’t mean I can be rude.”
“I’m not saying be rude. I’m saying draw a clear line,” she replied, looking back to Gale. “Gale looks to you, and if you don’t say anything, all the other women in this family will speak up.”
“Elspeth is trying to give us space.”
“Good, but still, don’t be afraid to exert yourself more. This is your time. His time. Not theirs.”
“Mom, you don’t get it. I don’t know anything. I don’t want to mess up.”
“You haven’t known anything for months and look how far you have gotten. Listening to advice is good, but don’t let anyone boss you around. I can’t bear to see it and hold my tongue, and it makes me worry about what will happen when I leave tonight.”
I frowned, hating that she reminded me again. “Mom, why do you have to go? Stay. Come on tour with us…”
“Odette, you are my world, but this is not my world,” she said, waving her hand over the throne room. “I do not like forcing myself to adapt here. I’m too old not to live the way I want to live.”
“But it’s okay for me to live here.”
“You’ve actually adjusted really well, all things considered. Look at you. Even when you sit now, you sit like a queen; every part of you is already molding to this life. And if you really hated it, you would have gotten on the plane with me all those months ago.”
I wanted to slouch and pout and be a little kid. “I still don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll pop in for Christmas and any other holiday, plus your birthday. But I can’t stay. At least not until they are used to you. And see you running the show. If I stay, they will either say you always come to me with problems or something else. I’ll go and return. It will be fine. We have video chats so often you will be sick of me.”
It was pointless to keep asking. When my mother made a decision, that was it.
“Odette, can you come here? I need you to see which one you believe is better,” Gale called for me, lifting the two molds in front of him to inspect.
“Go help your king,” my mother said to me even though I was already getting up.
“We’ll talk later.”
She nodded.
Looking away from her, I moved back to Gale’s side as he showed them to me. “Which one?”
Yeah…this was my life now, and I didn’t mind this part. These were easy problems to solve.
CHAPTER 8
This was the part I disliked.
“The team is in the drawing room, sir. However, the Grand Dowager insisted on joining, which then caused the Queen Mother to go as well,” Balduin reported at the door of our bedroom.
We’d gone to change out of our formal clothes when he arrived quickly in order to report to Gale. However, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. I looked between them both. And Gale once again had a deep, annoyed frown on his face and a wrinkle in his brow, his jaw tightening.
“The team?” I questioned. “What has everyone joined on?”
Every day there was something new I needed to learn.
“My embarrassment,” Gale muttered under his breath.
