“Why are you wearing my missing daughter’s locket?”
For several seconds, nobody in the ballroom seemed capable of moving.
Preston’s shattered champagne glass lay between us, spreading a thin line of gold liquid across the marble.
Lydia stood beside the stage with one hand pressed against her waist, her carefully arranged expression finally gone.
The senators, donors, officials, and cameras Preston had invited to witness my humiliation were now staring at me for an entirely different reason.
I could barely hear them.
I looked at King Alistair.
Then at the crest on the uniforms of the royal guards behind him.
A crowned white stag holding a rose.
My fingers opened around the locket.
The same symbol was engraved inside it.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It was the first thing I had said since Preston announced our separation.
The king’s face tightened.
“May I see it?”
Preston stepped forward before I could answer.
“Your Majesty, with respect, Claire has had that thing her entire life.
It proves nothing.
She was abandoned outside a church.
There are no records.
No parents.
No—”
King Alistair turned his head.
Preston stopped.
The look the king gave him was not anger.
Anger would have acknowledged Preston as an equal participant in the conversation.
This was dismissal.
“I was speaking to her.”
Preston’s jaw tightened.
I lifted the chain over my head.
My hands were steady until the locket left my skin.
Then they trembled.
For as long as I could remember, that piece of gold had been the only physical evidence that I had existed before the church steps in Pennsylvania.
Foster records described it simply as an unidentified pendant.
One jeweler believed it was European.
Another thought the crest had been privately commissioned.
A university archivist once spent three months trying to identify the symbol and eventually apologized for finding nothing.
I had stopped searching years ago.
Hope became expensive when it failed often enough.
King Alistair took the locket in both hands.
The instant he opened it, his breathing changed.
Inside were two shallow compartments.
One contained a faded miniature painting I had always assumed was decorative: a white rose against blue enamel.
The other held an engraving so small that it could barely be seen without magnification.
Alistair did not need magnification.
He traced the engraving with his thumb.
“A.E.A.,” he whispered.
I had seen those letters thousands of times.
I had never known what they meant.
The king closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the entire ballroom seemed to disappear for him.
“My daughter was named Amalia Elise Alistair.”
Something cold moved through my chest.
Preston laughed once.
It was the wrong sound at the wrong moment, forced from a man who could feel control slipping away and did not know how to stop it.
“With respect, Your Majesty, initials are hardly proof of royal lineage.”
