Whose Daughter is Daisy’s in ‘The Testaments’? The Book and Show Are Telling Very Different Stories

One of the most talked-about mysteries surrounding Hulu’s adaptation of ‘The Testaments’ is a question that has been nagging at viewers since the very first episode. Who exactly are Daisy’s real parents, and how does her true identity connect to the larger world of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’? The answer depends entirely on whether you are reading Margaret Atwood’s novel or watching the screen adaptation, and the gap between the two is far wider than most fans anticipated.

In the novel, sixteen-year-old Daisy is living in Canada, unaware of her true identity, and only after her adoptive parents are killed does she learn she was smuggled out of Gilead as a baby. That revelation is just the beginning of a much larger truth about who she really is, and it is a truth that carries serious consequences for the entire story.

Daisy’s Biological Parents in the Original Novel

In Atwood’s novel, it is eventually revealed that Daisy is the daughter of June and Nick, the daughter of the Handmaid known as Offred, since her real name is never technically used in the books. This identity twist is the emotional engine of the entire narrative, tying together the story’s three narrators in a way that feels both inevitable and devastating.

In Gilead, Daisy was known as Baby Nicole and became the subject of arguments between pro- and anti-Gilead activists. Daisy knows of Baby Nicole but does not know that this was her. The dramatic irony is quietly sustained across hundreds of pages before the full weight of it lands.

Simple math supports the connection, since Daisy was born to a handmaid sixteen years before the novel’s action begins, and Offred stepped into the van at the end of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ possibly pregnant with Nick’s baby, roughly fifteen years before the events of ‘The Testaments’.

Daisy and Agnes ultimately escape from Gilead and meet their mother, Offred, in Canada. Their reunion is one of the most quietly earned moments in Atwood’s work, and it gives the novel its emotional payoff.

June and Nick’s Daughter: How the Show Breaks from the Book

The Hulu adaptation picks up roughly four years after the conclusion of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and the showrunner confirmed that Daisy is not Nichole, also known as Holly, in the series. The compressed timeline makes it simply impossible for Atwood’s version of events to play out on screen.

Showrunner Bruce Miller explained that while Daisy in the television adaptation has a comparable origin story to her literary counterpart, they cannot be identical since Holly and Nichole would currently be just four or five years old, and Miller confirmed that as far as the show is concerned, baby Holly is safe growing up in Toronto, for now.

A reveal in ‘The Testaments’ season one episode seven confirms that Daisy’s biological parents are dead, which debunks the theory that her mother is June Osborne and represents a complete divergence from the backstory in the book, where Daisy is revealed to be June and Nick’s daughter. That single reveal reshapes the entire emotional dynamic between Daisy and Agnes on screen.

That also means she is not Agnes’s sister, and whatever bond they develop in the show will not stem from learning that they share the same mother, as it does in the novel.

The Book vs Show Differences That Are Reshaping ‘The Testaments’

In the show’s version of events, Rita explains to Daisy that her real parents got her out of Gilead and are no longer alive, a moment that strips away any remaining hope she had of a family reunion and forces her fully into the role of a resistance operative.

Daisy receives a fake identity, a fabricated history, and a tattoo that will need to be removed, and she is placed among the Pearl Girls with instructions to appear reluctant, to gather information without ever revealing why she is really there. Lucy Halliday carries these sequences with a composure that makes the deception feel genuinely dangerous.

Executive producer Warren Littlefield noted in a March interview that the world has moved on from events of the earlier series, framing ‘The Testaments’ as a story designed to stand entirely on its own. That creative philosophy appears to extend all the way to the show’s most fundamental character decisions.

Miller has suggested that Holly and Nichole might still appear later in the show, which means the door has not been fully closed on the baby who loomed so large over the original series.

Baby Nicole, Daisy, and the Identity at the Heart of ‘The Testaments’

The series follows three protagonists, Aunt Lydia played by Ann Dowd, Agnes played by Chase Infiniti, and Daisy, a young Canadian teen whose life is turned upside down when she discovers her connection to the Republic of Gilead. The casting and character framing have consistently positioned Daisy as the outsider whose awakening drives the plot forward.

The story follows the three women as their lives weave together under Gilead’s iron fist, and the show’s showrunner described Gilead itself as built on a perversion and misreading of Old Testament laws and codes. That context makes Daisy’s gradual understanding of where she came from all the more charged with meaning.

The adaptation makes Agnes and Daisy around the same age, with a year or two at most between them, whereas the novel maintains a far wider age gap between the two girls and does not bring Daisy into the narrative until several more years have passed. Compressing the timeline has forced the writers to build an entirely new emotional foundation for a character whose literary version was defined almost entirely by her bloodline.

In the novel, Daisy enters a series of safe houses and ends up with the Aunts and Supplicants alongside Agnes, and the two work together to attempt to bring down the government. Whether the show finds a way to preserve that bond through different means is now one of the most compelling threads left to follow in the remaining episodes. If you have been tracking every clue about Daisy’s real identity since episode one, what do you think the show is building toward, and does the decision to separate her from June’s bloodline make her story stronger or weaker than Atwood’s original?