Page 73 of Scandal Queen

“You like to pretend to be rude. I think we all know it’s an act.”

“A woman has come forward. She thinks Daisy is the daughter of her dead son.” My head pounded.

Nana stilled for a moment, her breath oozing out in one long exhale. “Oh.”

“Oh?”

“Leia, I’m not surprised. Are you… really?”

“Uh, yes. No one knows about her, never has.”

Nana patted my hand, her skin dry and crinkly like a paper bag used too many times. “Leia, my gorgeous, but utterly ridiculous granddaughter, everyone knows about her. Everyone. I can’t believe you weren’t expecting this to happen.”

“Why though? It’s not as though I told some guy I was pregnant and then ran away. Nobody knew. She was my secret.”

“Leia, nothing about you is secret now. Not where you buy your clothes, not where you went to school, not what you like to eat for lunch. Everyone knows everything. That’s the choice you made when you decided to be with him.”

I shook my head. “No one knows anything about me, much like they don’t know anything about the royal family. No one knows the Queen is probably the nicest person in the history of the universe, no one knows the King mucks out his own stables every day.” I trailed off, unable to articulate the things I knew about John.

“So what happens now? Why are you hiding under the duvet like a teenager instead of going to a dinner with the Russian president?

“Oliver knew. He knew this woman had come forward. Janine told him. They kept it from me.”

Nana smoothed a lock of hair behind her ear and I had to wonder, albeit briefly, why I didn’t inherit the good hair genes. Funny I only had a vague recollection of my own mother’s hair: knotty and greasy and always scraped back as she forwent personal hygiene in the search for her next fix. “They are trying to protect you.”

“No. They were trying to manage me.”

She scrunched a face. Now that, Daisy had inherited. “I don’t think so.”

“He’s going to try to find a way to make the problem go away. The family aren’t allowed to let internal matters reach outside ears.”

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“Well, no.”

“So you don’t know how he feels, or what he is doing? Right now, he’s standing in the reception for a state dinner and wondering where his partner is.”

“If we were true partners, he would have told me this days ago when he found out.”

“Or maybe he wanted the facts before he brought something to your plate that he knew would hurt you, hurt Daisy.”

“Or hurt his family.”

Nana stood up, her movements abrupt. “Leia. Stop hiding.”

I met her eyes. “What if someone wants to take her away from me? What if it makes people say I’m a bad mother, more than they already are?”

“Then, for fuck’s sake, show them you’re not.”

A tear slipped down my cheek. “I should have gone and looked for that guy.”

Nana’s shoulders sagged. “Is that what this is about? Guilt?”

I nodded, my words too tight to vocalise.

“Leia, you didn’t even know you were keeping Daisy. Your reasons for not going back to those flats and searching for a face you wouldn’t have recognised goes deeper than simple guilt.”

To my utter surprise Nana’s eyes filled with tears. “You’ve always protected your daughter, but now you have to let other people in to help you do that. Don’t fail the way I did. Make the right choices, do the right thing.”