Lies and Weddings(121)

“So now you’re denying that you love Rufus?”

“I’m not denying that at all. I do love him. I’m simply saying that it was never a dream of mine to marry him, or anyone for that matter. I don’t sit around having Cinderella fantasies like you seem to think that I do. Look, in my regular life I work seventy hours a week and I’m allotted six minutes per patient. Do you know how overburdened the NHS is? I don’t usually have the time to attend balls in palaces made out of ice.”

“You say you love my Rufus, so how can you bear to watch him lose his birthright? To lose Greshamsbury Hall and everything we’ve been preparing him for his entire life?”

You don’t know your son at all! Eden wanted to shout it in Arabella’s face, but she restrained herself. “Rufus has told me about a thousand times since the absurd offer came in that he would much rather lose everything than see me married to a psychopath with addiction issues.”

“Send him to a shrink! Send him to a rehab! People can change. You and Rufus have your head in the clouds! Rufus has no idea what he’s about to lose. He’s just like Luis Felipe—he has no clue what it’s really like not to have money, not to be in possession of his lands. And tell me, when will you ever have an opportunity like this again? You complain about your workload. If you marry Luis Felipe you will never have to work another minute of your life. You will want for nothing. Every couture house will be clamoring to seat you in the front row of their shows. I’ll even introduce you to my vendeuse at Chanel. You can sit beside me at the shows.”

“Lady Arabella, I love what I do, and I have absolutely no desire to sit in the front row of a Chanel show. If I’m ever fortunate enough to afford couture, I’d much rather spend that money on charitable pursuits.”

Arabella laughed derisively. “You know what your problem is? You are so self-righteous, you think you’re better than the rest of us just because you’re Florence Nightingale.”

“Florence Nightingale was a nurse. I am a doctor.”

“See what I mean? One little degree from Cambridge and you think you’re god’s gift.”

“I was simply stating a fact.”

“Yes, but you say it with such conceit. You don’t know your place. You never have. Well, let me enlighten you on something. You are not who you think you are. Your entire existence has been one big lie.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s been lying to you for your entire life. You are not really his daughter.”

Eden wondered if Arabella had gone temporarily insane. “What are you talking about?”

Arabella removed the burgundy folder from her tote bag and slid it across the table slowly. “This is your real birth certificate. You were born in Vancouver, Canada, not Houston, Texas. Your mother’s real name was Mary Gao. She was a beauty queen…She won Miss Hong Kong in the early nineties. Rosina knew her. When Mary found herself pregnant, she ran off to Canada and secretly had you. At some point your father came into the picture, adopted you, and got you a new birth certificate. All these secret documents unearthed by Rosina’s investigators prove it.”

“Rosina hired private investigators for this?” Eden paged through the folder, not believing her eyes.

“The best in the world, the best that her money can buy. Your father has deceived you your whole life. He’s actually your uncle, and your biological father is his brother, Henry—a gambler, a reprobate, an addict. So you see, I wouldn’t judge Luis Felipe Tan so harshly if I were you.”

“Where…where is Henry now?” Eden stammered.

“He was killed by Mary’s brother during a bar fight at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. Here’s the headline to prove it.”

Eden glanced at the article clipped from the South China Morning Post in the 1990s, feeling her body go numb. “So you unearthed all this…for what? What does it matter to you who my biological father was? How does this change anything? Whether my mother was a beauty queen or the queen of Sheba, I’m still never going to be good enough to marry your son.”

“I am just doing you a favor, I thought you’d want to know the truth. I know you’ve always yearned to know more about your mother. Now, we can keep this information just between the both of us. No one need ever know, not even my son…provided you agree to marry Luis Felipe.”

Eden stared at Arabella incredulously. “So let me try to understand what’s happening…you were given this information by Rosina and you say you’re doing me a favor, but what you’re really attempting to do is blackmail me. You got your hands on these secrets and you’ve made a decision to weaponize them. You want me to sacrifice myself to Luis Felipe so that you can continue living in your picture-perfect manor house.”

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask, is it?” Arabella said coolly.

Eden could feel her whole body on fire. “All my life I’ve tried to look up to you as a mother figure, but somehow I always knew that you could never play that role. You are around my mother’s age, you are Cantonese, but even as a very young girl I could sense that you had closed yourself off to me. I have never once been impolite to you, I’ve always taken great care to be on my best behavior around you, but no matter what I do, I always sense your disapproval. You resented it when I became close to your children, you were always trying to put me in my place as some sort of foundling you had done a tremendous favor. For so many years I would rack my brains thinking, Why doesn’t she like me? What did I do wrong? It’s taken me until now to realize why. It’s not what I’ve done, or what my lineage might be—it’s who I am. I’m Chinese. I can’t ever change that about me, and I wouldn’t want to. But you hate that about me, because for some reason you hate that about yourself. And you may try to find every excuse in the world to deny it to everyone—you may unearth secret documents from halfway around the world claiming that I’m illegitimate, that I’m trying to deceive Rufus, but really, you’re only deceiving yourself. You’ve succeeded in destroying your own life, and now you’re trying to destroy your children’s lives, but let me promise you one thing: you will never destroy mine!”