Her throat tightened again, and she shoved the emotion down.
No, it was better not to dream, even if dreaming was all her heart wanted to do.
As she approached the house, the door opened, and Tabitha appeared, a shrill screech filling the air. “Where have you been?”
“I was in town selling eggs,” Ella began.
“I have been waiting for you for the better part of an hour,” her stepmother snapped. “You should not have left without asking me.”
A cold heat filled Ella’s chest. This woman was not her mother, she was not her daughter, and yet she had spent her life taking care of the woman as if that was the only thing she’d been put on this earth to do.
And she didn’t even know who her real mother was.
“Who was my mother?” she demanded, stopping halfway up the walk.
“As if I would tell you,” her stepmother sneered.
“You don’t know, do you?” Ella asked.
Her stepmother frowned. “Why does it matter to you?”
“Because I would like to know who my mother was,” Ella said simply. “Surely that shouldn’t be difficult. I’m sure Father told you. Was I named after her?”
Her stepmother sneered. “We don’t know,” she said. “You turned up on your father’s doorstep a year or so before I married him. You only knew your name, not who your parents were or where you belonged.”
Ella froze.
It was true.
“He was a fool and decided to keep you instead of turning you over to the orphanage like he should have,” Tabitha continued. Her eyes narrowed the way they often did before delivering a particularly cutting remark. “Your parents were lucky to be rid of you.”
She was not her father’s daughter.
And she’d known her name was Ella.
She had to be the missing duchess.
There were too many coincidences.
“And you didn’t think to tell me after all this time?” Ella asked, her voice cracking. “You knew I wasn’t his daughter, but you kept me here with you all these years.”
“Where else would you go?” her stepmother asked. “You have no skills, no family. You have nothing.”
She was wrong.
“I am more than your servant,” Ella said, her voice filled with a strength she hadn’t known she had. “I may not have family, but I have friends, and I have worth, and I deserve to be loved.”
Her stepmother said nothing, and a cold fury filled Ella.
“You ought not to have kept the truth from me all these years. I was still a child when he died. You could have sent me to the orphanage then, but instead, you kept me to be your servant and to pretend you were a good person.”
She could remember the reaction of the townsfolk when her father died, how she’d heard the whispers that Tabitha was a good wife for keeping her despite having only been married to her father for a short time.
“Was that why we’ve had to move so often? Did people notice that you and your daughters took advantage of me?”
Tabitha still said nothing.
The chains holding Ella there for her father’s sake snapped and she took a deep breath.
