"I couldn't tell the public that she died drowning in a toilet when she was drunkenly puking her guts out!" (Before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, I know someone who died that way and yes, our family is okay with finding that type of death funny)
Beauty is growing up. She is maturing. The time in the castle has made her older and wiser. And just perhaps, it seems to me that her face and body has changed a little too. In particular three pages ago her womanly curves seemed more... noticeable than in the past (I hope that didn't come across as weird) and in today's post her face in the fourth frame just seems... older. Wiser.
She is ready to ask hard questions, to learn hard truths. Maybe, as the "heart" of her family and of Beast, her destiny is to bring these broken people together and help bring healing to everyone.
Beauty's mother is an important key to all of this. And now I'm just beginning to wonder: What is her relation to the Beast's mother? Did their lives intertwine as much as their children's lives are?
Dad, you really might want to rephrase that so it doesn't sound like a thinly-veiled murder confession because we know that's probably not how it went down, but wow this evasive maneuver isn't a good look.
So Beauty doesn't actually know whether or not her mother died from illness or if she left them. That's...wow, I'm astonished that she didn't ask, but given how much Beauty didn't want to bother her family, I can understand why she wouldn't bring such a painful subject up. But her father is basically confirming that no, it wasn't sickness at all, but something else. The sickness story was just something they spread around after she vanished, because it was easier to accept than the truth would have been.