The Story of Daisy’s Real Mother in ‘The Testaments’ Has a Twist the Show and the Book Can’t Agree On

Anyone hunting for a clean answer to who Daisy’s mother actually is in ‘The Testaments’ is about to find out the question has two answers depending on whether you are reading Margaret Atwood or watching Hulu. The teen at the center of the new sequel series and the Booker Prize-winning novel sits on a family secret that ripples back through everything ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ built.

In the book, the answer is one of the most emotionally charged reveals in the entire Gilead saga. In the Hulu adaptation, showrunner Bruce Miller made a deliberate decision to rewrite that connection entirely. The result is two very different versions of the same character, and two very different mothers waiting at the end of her story.

Daisy’s Real Parents in Margaret Atwood’s Novel

In Atwood’s novel, Daisy grows up in Toronto with her parents Neil and Melanie, who run a secondhand clothing store called The Clothes Hound. Their shop is actually a front for the Mayday resistance, the underground network smuggling women out of Gilead. Daisy has no idea who she really is, only that she feels strangely distant from the couple raising her.

Everything changes on her sixteenth birthday. A car bomb at the store kills Neil and Melanie, and a family friend named Ada takes Daisy on the run. It is on the run that she learns the truth about her identity, the one piece of information her adoptive parents died protecting.

Daisy was born in Gilead and smuggled across the border into Canada by her mother, an escaped Handmaid. Neil and Melanie were Mayday operatives assigned to keep her hidden from a regime that has spent years demanding her return.

How Baby Nicole’s Identity Connects to Offred

Once Daisy learns her past, the bigger reveal lands. She is the famous child known across Gilead as Baby Nicole, the propaganda symbol the regime turned into a national obsession after she was smuggled out as an infant. Her biological mother is Offred from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, who became pregnant by Nick and escaped to Canada.

That makes Daisy and Agnes Jemima half sisters, both daughters of the same Handmaid. Agnes learns earlier in the novel that she is the half sister of Baby Nicole, the girl whose return Gilead has been demanding for years. The two narrators of the book are bound by blood without knowing it for most of the story.

Atwood has been famously coy about confirming the mother’s identity outright. In an interview with Time, she said “We are pretty sure, but we don’t really know”, leaning into the same anonymity that defined Offred in the original novel. The author prefers readers to make their own connections, especially given that Offred’s real name is never spoken in either book.

How the Hulu Series Rewrote Daisy’s Origin Story

Hulu’s adaptation makes the single biggest change to Atwood’s source material right at the center of Daisy’s identity. Showrunner Bruce Miller confirmed that due to the age differences between Hannah and Nicole in the finale of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, Daisy is not Nicole in ‘The Testaments’ series. Holly, also known as Baby Nicole, is still a young child being raised by June.

Instead, Daisy is a separate Toronto teenager whose biological parents are never revealed onscreen. She was born in Gilead and smuggled out as a baby to be raised in Toronto by two loving parents whose identities the show keeps hidden, and after they are murdered for their Mayday ties, June Osborne arrives to keep her safe. June becomes Daisy’s handler rather than her mother, the connective tissue between the two series.

Miller told The Hollywood Reporter that the four-year time jump after ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ finale forced his hand, since making the original Daisy work would have meant aging Holly into a teenager overnight. He explained that he tried to keep the essence of Nichole as much as possible with the new Daisy, while still making her her own character and her own person.

Why Daisy and Agnes Still Anchor ‘The Testaments’

Even with the rewritten parentage, the spine of the story still belongs to the two girls. Lucy Halliday plays Daisy, the young Canadian teen working as an undercover Mayday operative inside Gilead, while Chase Infiniti plays Agnes MacKenzie, the biological daughter of June Osborne known to longtime fans as Hannah. Their bond inside Aunt Lydia’s preparatory school is what drives the entire series forward.

In the novel, the emotional payoff is enormous because the girls are blood sisters discovering each other for the first time. After making it back to Canada with the documents that take down Gilead, Agnes and Nicole are reunited with their mother. The closing inscription Atwood wrote names them as sisters bound to the same family.

The show is preserving a different version of that closeness. Miller said he wanted to change as little as possible about the character, noting that Daisy looks a little like June and acts like June, with Lucy Halliday taking on those mannerisms through scenes with Elisabeth Moss. The mother daughter dynamic survived even when the literal blood relation did not.

For readers who grew up with Atwood’s reveal that Baby Nicole was Offred’s smuggled daughter, watching the Hulu version quietly tweak that DNA is the kind of choice that splits a fanbase right down the middle. Which version of Daisy’s mother hits harder for you, the book’s blood reunion with Offred or the show’s surrogate bond between June and a girl who simply needed her.