“Of course you do,” Tess said. “Rightly so.”
“May I have that?” Rudy reached for the mini muffin that sat next to fruit slices on Tess’s plate.
Adroitly, she intercepted his hand with a defensive maneuver. “Borderline diabetes,” she reminded him. Resigned sigh. She checked her watch. “Finish up because I need to take you to your water aerobics class at the Y.”
“Do I have to go today?”
“Absolutely. You made a commitment when you signed up for the series of classes—”
“Really, it was you who made me sign up.”
“—and now we have to follow through.”
“I don’t like water aerobics,” Rudy confessed to Leah.
Ten minutes later, the older couple headed out the door.
Leah slipped her laptop from her messenger bag and settled it on the table. Here, away from Dylan’s prying eyes, she could turn her attention to the pursuit of answers regarding the events that had occurred the day of her birth.
Since she’d followed the Brooksides to church almost two weeks ago, she’d been combing through more and more accounts of real life switched-at-birth cases.
The majority occurred because of an accident. Two sets of twins were inadvertently mixed up so that the pairs of brothers grew up thinking they were fraternal twins when they were identical. Hospital staffers lost ID bracelets. Girls born five minutes apart were confused with each other.
However, some switches derived from even more obvious negligence. A drunk nurse set two babies in the same incubator to treat them for jaundice, and then returned them to the wrong mothers. Twins placed in foster care were reunited with their parents, who later learned that only one of the boys returned to them was their biological child.
In at least one case—the most famous of them all—babies had been switched on purpose out of a misguided sense of compassion. A couple had been trying for years to conceive a child. When they finally gave birth to a baby, it was discovered that the girl had a grave heart condition. Allegedly, a doctor instructed employees to give the sick baby to a family that already had five children, and to give the healthy baby to the couple who’d struggled to conceive.
In carefully going back over the paperwork from her mother’s delivery and hospital stay, Leah had taken extra notice of a detail she’d previously skimmed past.
The names of the nurses.
Sebastian had mentioned that he thought it more likely that a nurse had been responsible for the switch than a doctor. Between the labor and delivery room and the neonatal nursery, four nurses had handled her care in the first hour after her birth.
Lois Simpson
Bonnie O’Reilly
Tracy Segura
Joyce Caffarella
The nurses represented a potential source of new information. If she could locate where they were now, she could ask them questions.
She typed Lois Simpson nurse Atlanta, Georgia into Google.
The very first link that popped up read Lois Simpson Obituary—Milledgeville, Georgia | Legacy.com.
A sense of gravity settled over her as she followed the link and read the obituary. Lois had passed away two years before, at the age of eighty-six. Thus, she would have been sixty when Leah was born. The obituary mentioned that she’d worked as a nurse at Emory University Hospital and Magnolia Avenue Hospital for a combined total of thirty years. Lois, a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, had been famous for her homemade lemon pound cake and singing in her church’s choir.
Leah would not be able to contact Lois.
She began again with the name Bonnie O’Reilly.
Several hits came up—websites, more obits, images. She scrolled through them, clicked on a few. It didn’t take long to determine that none of these Bonnie O’Reillys were the one she sought. She visited the most prominent social media sites without luck. Returning to Google, she combed through four more pages of results.
She hadn’t found an obituary for a Bonnie O’Reilly who’d been a nurse in Atlanta, which meant Bonnie might still be living. If so, Bonnie was not, apparently, posting about her life for the world to see. Nor could Leah find any articles that mentioned her.
When Leah ran a search for Tracy Segura, she instantly came upon a Facebook profile that listed Magnolia Avenue Hospital under the “Work and Education” heading. A thin woman with strawberry blond hair, Tracy must have been in her early twenties when Leah was born, because she looked no older than fifty now.
Leah shook out her fingers, then composed a Facebook DM to Tracy. She explained that she’d been born at Magnolia Avenue and asked if Tracy would be willing to answer a few questions.
Finally, she entered Joyce Caffarella into the search engine. The third result appeared promising.
Joyce Caffarella—RN—St. Joseph’s | LinkedIn. Joyce’s LinkedIn profile provided a treasure trove of information. Her picture revealed a stout woman with a broad smile. Mousse and hair spray pushed her short platinum hair high. According to her page, she’d started at a pediatrician’s office, accomplished a brief stint as a surgical nurse, then moved to Magnolia Avenue for six years. Since then, she’d been working at a hospital in Peachtree City.
Leah sent her a private message identical to the one she’d sent Tracy.
Just how long, she wondered, should she expect it to take before she heard back?
Somebody gave you a gift,” Dylan called out to her the next day when Leah returned home from a hike.
“Hmm?”
She found him at the dining room table, his attention on his phone, laying waste to a box of Cheez-Its. Near his elbow sat a small gift wrapped in ivory paper and tied with an orange satin bow.
“Where did this come from?”
“Dunno. I saw it sitting on the front door mat when I got home from Braxton’s.”
“No packaging? No address?”
“Just that little card.”
She picked it up. The miniature card affixed to the bow simply read Leah.
Dylan slanted a mocking look at her. “You should probably be really careful with that. You don’t know where it came from, and it might be filled with explosives. Or poison. Explosives and poison are dangerous.”
“Quite right! I encourage you to be cautious of unidentified packages. Also, be wary of underage drinking and speeding and twerking. Never engage in any of that.”
He snorted and returned to his phone and food.
Leah slipped off the bow and raised the lid. Within, a gold necklace glimmered against a backdrop of velvet. A smattering of tiny stars and dots engraved its oval charm.
Wonder moved through her like flour through a sifter. The necklace was delicate. Classy.
She pulled the velvet backing from the bottom of the box. Beneath, she found a single piece of stationery marked with the name of a jewelry store.
The necklace shows the brightest stars in the sky on the night you were born. Some things might have gone wrong on that day, but you weren’t one of them.
-Sebastian
Since she’d received her DNA results, she’d sought to address her birthday mix-up in the way that had always served her best: with logic. Logically she knew she wasn’t the mistake.
Emotionally, that was a little harder to internalize. Across her early childhood years, she’d always felt that she didn’t fit. She’d come to accept and even own that fact. But now evidence proved that she was more than simply someone who didn’t fit. She was, without a doubt, a tremendous oddity. She’d been switched at birth when no one else she’d met or was likely to meet in her lifetime had been switched at birth.