Royal Wedding (The Princess Diaries 11)

This was cold, even for Grandmère. “Wow,” I said. “Remind me not to call you to pay the ransom if I ever get kidnapped.”

“Oh, please,” Grandmère said. “That’s why we pay ransom insurance.”

“Well,” I said. The egg-salad sandwich looked good, so I took one, too, even though my stomach was churning with anxiety. “Whatever you found can’t be that bad. He got arrested weeks ago, and you’re only calling it a matter of ‘national urgency’ now?”

“I assigned a member of the RGG to look into it and he just got back to me with a full report on the gravity of the matter this morning.”

“Oh, well, the RGG! And what could the Royal Genovian Guard possibly have found in Dad’s personal effects that was so shocking it justifies forcing me to have a wedding I haven’t agreed to?”

Grandmère cleared her throat very dramatically and said the last thing I ever expected:

“Amelia, you have a sister.”

Fortunately I’d swallowed before she made this pronouncement, or I’d have choked. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You heard me. You are not your father’s only enfant naturel”—which means “love child” in French. “He has another.”

Stupidly all I could think about at that moment was the scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back when Obi-Wan sighs that Luke is their last hope and Yoda says, “No. There is another.”

Of course you have to wait for a whole other movie to find out that “the other” is Princess Leia, who happens to be Luke’s secret twin.

“Wait a minute.” I wasn’t aware that I had allowed my sandwich to dangle from my fingers until I felt Rommel’s sharp teeth nip them as he stole it. “Ow!” I cried. Then I said, “That’s not possible, Grandmère. If I had a sister, Dad would have told me. Besides, you know perfectly well Dad can’t have any more children because the chemo he had for his testicular cancer rendered him infertile. That’s why I’m the heir to the throne—”

“Of course,” Grandmère interrupted, rolling her eyes. “And when he told you that pretty little story twelve years ago, he had just received that devastating news from his doctors. But as we all know, doctors aren’t always correct. You will recall the time I was told to avoid smoking and alcohol because it was believed I had a stomach tumor. But it turned out only to be acid reflux. I took a few Tums and I was fine.”

“Grandmère,” I said, still stunned. “That is not the same thing.”

“Well,” she said. “Be that as it may, you have a sister. She was probably conceived right around the time your father delivered that quaint little speech to you. But as it happened, he still had a few active swimmers left in the old pipeline.”

“Eww!” I did some swift math in my head, which wasn’t easy, not only because math has never been my strong suit but also because Grandmère’s verbal imagery had completely grossed me out. “Wait . . . so you’re saying I have a twelve-year-old little sister?”

“Yes, that is precisely what I’m saying.”

“How do you know this?” I asked suspiciously. “What exactly did you find in Dad’s desk to prove this? It wasn’t another one of those e-mails, was it?”

My grandmother is one of the many people who feels compelled to help out whatever down-on-his-luck Nigerian prince (because one royal should help out another royal) comes her way, and she actually believed the one about a close relative needing cash wired to them immediately because they’d been robbed and were stranded in Mexico. Worse, she believed I was the person who’d been robbed. Someone managed to find my private e-mail address and use it to scam my grandmother out of $30,000 (which thankfully she could afford) before anyone on the palace staff could find out what she was doing and stop her (not that anyone would have been able to. Once Grandmère gets an idea in her head, there’s no talking her out of it).

Grandmère was livid when she found out I was safely in class at Sarah Lawrence and nowhere near Mexico, and that there was a complete stranger running around Mexico $30,000 richer.

The worst decision we ever made was allowing my grandmother to have access to the Internet (although she adores commenting anonymously. She is the worst troll ever. No one on Jezebel.com or Reddit knows that the Dowager Princess of Genovia is the person making all the mean comments about how the fat children just need to use more self-control and they’ll lose weight).

“You know what you saw was probably just another kind of scam, right?” I asked her. “People contact me all the time saying they’re my long-lost relative—which, especially with all these genealogy websites, could even be true. Six degrees of separation, and all that. We’re all cousins, basically. But I would never send those people any money, or give any credence at all to their crazy claims. Dad wouldn’t either.”

“Unfortunately, Amelia, this isn’t a scam,” Grandmère said haughtily. “I can assure you that this person does, in fact, exist, and is, in fact, your sister. Otherwise, I highly doubt your father would have been making child-support payments to her—monthly—for the past twelve years. I saw them in his private bank-account book.”

My mind reeled. “Grandmère, that—that can’t be true. The payments must have been for something else.”

“Not according to what José says in his report.”

“José?” I was pouring myself another drink, this time with shaky fingers. “José as in José de la Rive, the director of the Royal Genovian Guard, Lars’s boss?”

“Well, naturally, Amelia. Despite what you might think of me, I wasn’t simply going to assume that what I saw in your father’s bankbook was true, not after Mexico . . . and not without sending someone to check on it. And José is, of course, the very best, and quite experienced in this kind of thing. He used to work for Interpol. The terrorism unit.” She got a faraway look in her eyes that I recognized. It was the same one she’d worn around the time of the James Franco affair. “José is surprisingly gentlemanly for a man skilled in the use of torture.”

This was getting worse and worse.

“Oh, Grandmère,” I said. “Please tell me you didn’t send José to waterboard this little girl’s family!”

“Of course not, Amelia,” she said in disgust. “What do you take me for? I sent José to Cranbrook, New Jersey, to collect DNA from the child for a paternity test.”