Leah pulled the original file toward her. Chest tightening with expectation, she opened it.
The papers within had turned beige and brittle with age. A smattering of mold splayed across the top right edge. She positioned the first two sheets side by side.
Her biological mother’s name: Trina Brookside.
Eagerly, she read the remaining information. As far as Leah could tell, things had gone well with Trina’s labor, but after the baby had been delivered . . . She narrowed her eyes, trying to understand. “I’m following the doctor’s notes right up until the baby was born.”
“The staff in the delivery room knew that Trina was diabetic, and they were prepared for the complications that can cause,” Sebastian explained. “As soon as the baby was delivered, they noted that she had cyanosis, which means she was bluish in color. She was taken to the nursery and given oxygen. Her condition improved quickly, and the pediatrician on staff concluded that she was healthy. Essentially, she just needed a little time to get acclimated to life outside the womb.”
Leah’s brain constructed a chain of events. “Erica Montgomery suffered placental abruption, so they put her under and performed an emergency C-section. Her baby girl was born at 10:10 a.m. with a rapid heartbeat. They took her directly to the nursery for treatment.” Leah pointed to the paper. “It says here that Trina Brookside gave birth to her baby eighteen minutes later, at 10:28. Trina’s baby girl was also taken to the nursery. Is it likely that either a rapid heartbeat or cyanosis could have caused problems down the road for the babies?”
“No. Both babies had issues that, once stabilized, were no longer of concern.”
“I’m guessing it was during the interval when the babies were being treated in the nursery that they were switched.”
“That would make sense.”
“As soon as the babies were well, they must have been sent to the wrong mothers. Erica’s baby was taken to Trina. And I, Trina’s baby, was taken to Erica. Who do you think might have been responsible for the switch? A doctor? Nurses?”
“Most likely nurses. They’re the ones responsible for transporting babies between rooms.”
Leah moved the pages to the side, revealing two new pages. Her eyes scanned the lines of text. Trina and Erica had stayed in the same wing of the same hospital for two days, both of them bonding with each other’s baby, before Trina had gone home.
Trina had been twenty-seven years old at the time. Married. This pregnancy was her first. Her address: 11482 Riverchase Road, Atlanta, Georgia. Ten numbers had been written clearly and decisively onto the line beside Phone Number. Those numbers practically blinked like a neon sign. What if she dialed that number and her biological mother answered?
Surely, her mother would not answer. This number was a landline from The Time Before Everyone Had a Cell Phone, which meant that Trina probably wasn’t using the same number now that she’d used then. It was also a stretch, but perhaps not as large of a stretch, to think Trina might still live at the house on Riverchase Road. As soon as Leah left here, she’d drive there. Just to look.
She uncovered the next two pages. One was a birth certificate. Katrina Elizabeth Wallace Brookside and her husband, Jonathan Delaney Brookside, had named their daughter Sophie Grace.
Trina and Sophie. Leah rolled the unfamiliar names around in her brain. She tried on Leah Brookside for size—except, she’d never have been Leah Brookside. Had things gone differently, she’d have lived her life as Sophie Grace Brookside.
The next page divulged information about Trina’s pregnancy, including the fact that her blood type was B, which meant her husband’s blood type must be A, like Leah. It also meant that Sophie’s possible blood types—B and O—would not raise any red flags with her or her parents because those types could naturally occur from Trina and Jonathan.
Unless Sophie did DNA testing like Leah had done, she’d have no reason to discover that she was not related to her mother and father.
The next page showed a photo of baby Sophie. The child in this photo was Erica Montgomery’s baby. Yet Leah was looking at a face that Erica and Todd had never had the opportunity to look upon.
The infant had slit her eyes open as if she found the light of the world to be an unwelcome assault. Her lips formed a pink rosebud. Her eyes were dark, as was her dusting of hair.
She looked just like Dylan had when he’d been a newborn.
Sebastian had never felt such an overwhelming pull toward a woman in his life. He knew why he felt the pull. Leah was brainy, kind, at peace with herself, challenging, funny. He loved that she said random things about flowers serving as a metaphor for life and melons shaped like rhomboids.
What he didn’t know: Why, of all people, did the woman he felt this way about have to be the woman Ben loved?
After leaving the hospital, they came to a stop at Leah’s car, parked in an outdoor lot.
She dashed a piece of hair away from her face. “My head is spinning with everything I just learned.”
“I can imagine.” He wished he had something more comforting to offer. “Are you going to contact Trina and Jonathan Brookside?”
“I don’t know. At this point, I’m simply planning to stalk the Brooksides on the Internet . . . in a very friendly, non-creepy way—”
“Very non-creepy.”
“—to see what I can learn about their lives and about their daughter’s life.”
When Sebastian was young and had asked his mom about his father, she’d told him plainly that she’d met him at a party and that they’d had a one-night stand. Later, when his mom discovered she was pregnant, she’d contacted his father as a courtesy. Sebastian suspected they’d both been relieved when they’d learned the other was happy to continue leading separate lives. His father didn’t have to be a father. His mother could be a mother without a stranger’s influence.
Sebastian knew his father’s name, but felt nothing toward him except vague resentment. No connection. No affection. No desire to communicate with him.
Leah held her purse strap with both hands, stacked one atop the other. “I can’t thank you enough for stepping in and helping me with all of this.”
“Not a problem.”
“No, really.” She regarded him steadily. “Thank you.”
His body roared in response, and he had to lock his teeth together to keep from saying Don’t fall in love with Ben. Please don’t. “You’re welcome.”
His awareness of the rest of the world—the noise, the cars, the colors —sucked away.
“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.”
Her words came as such a shock that it took him a second to compute them. She found him appealing? Pleasure collided with guilt, freezing him.
She slid into the driver’s seat of her gray Honda Pilot, which was old but in good condition. “Good-bye.” Holding the door ajar, she waited for him to respond.
Say something, you idiot.
She started her car. “Good-bye,” she repeated, maybe thinking he hadn’t heard the first time.
“Good-bye,” he said.
She shut her door and drove away.
As soon as she was out of sight, he swung on his heel and tunneled his hands into his hair.
The day of the farmers market, Ben had said that Leah was rare.
He’d been right. She was rare.
And she wasn’t coming back.
Had that been awkward? What she’d just said to him?
“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.” Her words had seemed appropriate to her while she was speaking them, but then his face had gone strangely blank in response.
She replayed it. Huh. The statement still seemed acceptable to her. Friendly and complimentary. Of course, it was possible that that had been an awkward thing to say and had only seemed normal to her.
If so, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned him about her lackluster social skills.
And, of course, it could have been worse. She could have confessed her fascination with his lips or, unforgivably, failed to solve a quadratic equation in his presence.
Where was she driving?
She’d been so preoccupied with Sebastian that she’d failed to type Trina and Jonathan’s address into her GPS before leaving the hospital. Smoothly, she pulled into a strip mall and parked. She peeked at her reflection. Even now, after the gale force winds of her parents’ identity and Sebastian’s nearness, it mollified her to see that she looked calm.
She typed 11482 Riverchase Road into her phone.
“Turn right at Beverly Road,” her phone’s Irish male voice instructed her. She had a closer relationship with that voice than she’d ever had with a boyfriend.
She followed the Irishman’s directions.
A twenty-minute drive brought her to the well-established Morningside Lenox Park neighborhood. Hilly tree-lined streets harbored homes that had been built in the first half of the twentieth century. This neighborhood would have been pricey for a young family three decades ago, just as it was now.
Leah parked a little ways down and across the street from 11482.
Feeling conspicuous, like a cop on a stakeout, she scoured the length of the street, then eyed Trina and Jonathan’s house. What if one of her family members walked out that door? Or spotted her from inside and came out to question her?
Stillness encased the entire block. Nothing moved, except for gently swaying branches. Most likely, she could stay here for a short period of time without anyone noticing.
The Dutch blue trim of the home emphasized its muted brick exterior and charming black front door. Planting beds tucked tidy shrubs against the base of the structure. The flowerpots on the front step burst with geraniums.
When she was brought home from the hospital as a newborn, she ought to have been brought here, to this stately Americana home. It was easy to picture a baby nursery in that front right room. It would have a big window, wood floors, crown molding.
In her earliest memories, she’d lived in an uninspiring two-bedroom apartment. Dad had had the design aesthetic of a frat boy; Mom had accessorized their hodgepodge furniture with international treasures from places she’d never had the opportunity to visit. A wall hanging from India. Art from Venezuela. A tablecloth from Thailand. Those items had been colorful, but they’d also reinforced the message Mom had communicated in a million subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Namely, I’d rather be anywhere other than here.
How different would her childhood have been, had Leah grown up in this place?
Memory-laden minutes slid past.
She had enough familiarity with Zillow.com from when she’d been shopping for a house in Misty River to know that the site provided data on a property’s prior sales. She accessed the site on her phone and ran a search. After some scrolling and clicking, she discovered that this house had been purchased by new owners five times since the year of her birth.
In fact, it had been sold just four years after she’d been born, ostensibly by Trina and Jonathan, if they’d been owners and not renters when they’d lived here. Either way, Trina and Jonathan hadn’t resided here in a long, long time.
She was glad she’d come, nonetheless. This detour had provided insight into her biological mother and father and what her upbringing might have been like had they been the ones to raise her.
Her family life hadn’t been wretched. Her needs had been met. That said, her family life hadn’t been as pretty as the picture this house presented, either.
Just because the house looks ideal on the outside doesn’t mean that the Brooksides’ life was ideal, Leah.
Yes, but what if the family life on the inside did match the ideal on the outside? If so, how was she supposed to reconcile herself to that?
When Leah arrived home from Atlanta that evening, her house welcomed her with silence and a lingering whiff of pineapple from her unlit candle. Dylan was gone, hanging out with his friend Braxton.
She hurried to her computer the way she’d hurried to Math Olympiad contests in fifth grade and opened Facebook. She hoped the Brooksides were the type of people who, unlike her, shared their lives often and freely on social media without regard for privacy settings.
She entered Trina Wallace Brookside into the search bar. Only one of the results looked like she could be the right fit. However, Leah opted to rule out the more unlikely candidates first. A few of them were too young. One had been born in England and lived there still.
Finally, anticipation mounting, she brought up the most likely Trina. The woman had created a close-up profile picture from her larger cover photo. The photo captured her solo, standing on a balcony overlooking a beautiful Italian-looking town. She was half turned to the camera with a relaxed smile.
Leah went still. Trina’s face was lined with years, but her facial structure, height, and body type were very similar to Leah’s. She’d styled her blond hair in a long bob that was slightly shorter in back than in the front. She wore a navy-and-white-striped boatneck shirt with roomy sleeves.
Unfortunately for Leah’s purposes, Trina was indeed someone who had regard for privacy settings. She’d made zero information about herself available to people she hadn’t approved as Facebook friends.
Leah typed Sophie Brookside into the search bar. Again, she knew at once, from the picture alone, who her Sophie was. Again, she eliminated the others first before visiting her Sophie’s page.
The circular profile picture of Sophie (Brookside) Robbins revealed a lovely brunette. For her cover photo, she’d chosen an outdoor wedding shot. In it, she was beaming at the camera while holding the hand of her good-looking groom. She’d chosen a strapless wedding dress and knotted her hair into a sophisticated style at the nape of her neck. The veil attached to the top of her bun extended into the breeze in a whimsical line. Her groom regarded her with a besotted grin.
Sophie was slender, stylish, and, judging by this photo, terrifically happy.
Leah had never wanted to marry! Even so, a slither of jealousy snaked around her ribs and squeezed.
Was Sophie (Brookside) Robbins living the life Leah was supposed to have lived?
Was Leah the one who’d been intended for the gown, the veil, the groom? But instead had become, because of all the “nurture” factors in the “nature vs. nurture” equation, the one supporting her brother on a teacher’s salary?
Like her mother, Sophie shared no personal details with those outside her circle of friends.
Leah opened Instagram and hunted for Trina and Sophie there. She only found Sophie, who’d used the same wedding photo on Instagram as on Facebook. Here again, she maintained a private account. Leah tried the remaining social media platforms but wasn’t able to find them.
She surfed back to Trina and Sophie’s Facebook pages and spent more time absorbing the images.
Upon further reflection, she did not feel that she’d been intended for a gown, veil, and groom. But she did feel—very strongly—that she was intended for a PhD. It had been her dream since Ms. Santiago, her second-grade teacher, had told her about the career paths open to academics.
If she’d gone home from the hospital with Trina and Jonathan, she might have been free to follow through on Princeton’s PhD offer. She might be teaching at a university right now. Writing papers, giving lectures, meeting with students.
Grief sent her bolting into the kitchen. She opened a can of mixed nuts and munched while her mind churned. With one hand, she scooped up more nuts, with the other, she slid her phone from her pocket and indulged in her guilty pleasure—browsing the digital album where she kept the dozens of pictures of Princeton she’d collected over the years.
She had so many pictures of the school, and had studied them all so carefully, that she probably knew the campus and the college’s history better than most of their incoming students.
She never could decide if these pictures were a healthy way to process her loss or an unhealthy fixation on her loss.
Both?
She could bear without too much difficulty the idea that she may have missed out on a wedding because she’d been switched at birth. But it was much harder to bear the idea that she could have missed out on the chance to further her education because she’d been switched at birth.
She still had every intention of furthering her education when Dylan left for college. She’d take as many courses as she could handle time-wise, while continuing to work, and money-wise, while contributing to Dylan’s tuition. Eventually, she’d achieve her PhD. She would. It’s just that, to get there, she’d have to climb a challenging uphill path. The prestigious, fully funded route of years ago was gone.
She shoveled more nuts into her mouth.
It was too soon to think about her doctoral work. Nearly a year remained until Dylan’s graduation. For now, her primary focus was to ensure that he made it to his freshman dorm room in one piece and well prepared for independence.
With God’s help, she and Dylan had come a long way together. With God’s help, they’d cross the remaining distance.
A snide voice within her sneered, He’s not even your brother.
“Yes he is,” she whispered to the empty room. The mighty ties of love and loyalty that bound her to him had not changed. The truest truth of her life was that she’d love Dylan always. Unconditionally.
The things she’d learned today didn’t have to mean that Sophie had been the beneficiary of the switch and Leah the loser . . . because Leah had gotten Dylan, and she wouldn’t relinquish him for anything. She’d chosen his well-being above Princeton, and she’d chosen rightly. She didn’t regret it. Given the same set of circumstances, she’d make the same decision.
It would serve her well to remember that none of the ramifications of the switch were Sophie’s fault. She and Sophie had been minutes old when the mistake had occurred. Both of them helpless newborns. Victims. Sophie had been robbed of the opportunity to grow up with her biological family just like Leah had.
She should feel kinship with Sophie. And she did. . . .
It’s just that she felt a bit of hostility toward her, too.
How many nuts had she just eaten? Hopefully not half the can. She set them back on the shelf and returned to the dining room to Google Jonathan Brookside.
She hadn’t been able to find anything on him last week, but she’d given up after the first three or four pages of hits. This time, she’d dig deeper.
Sure enough, on the eleventh page of hits, she came upon two future-casting articles attributed to Jonathan Brookside, Founder, Gridwork Communications Corporation. The pieces were both well written. One article had appeared six years ago, the other eight. She had no way of confirming if this was her Jonathan, because no information was given about his age or family status.
She went to Gridwork Communications Corporation’s website and learned that they were a computer services company located in Atlanta. It made sense that a man who’d lived in Atlanta in young adulthood might have founded a business in the same city.
Carefully, she deleted her browser history in case Dylan attempted to snoop.
She and her brother were about to leave on their epic road trip. Her goal for their time away: to rest and to fill her days with new places and experiences. She refused to let this thing with her past distract her so much that she couldn’t enjoy the vacation she’d spent six months planning.
Fate, destiny, paternity were weighty issues. Twenty-eight years had gone by without her knowing anything about the Brooksides. It wouldn’t hurt to give herself time to strategize her next move.
One afternoon in mid-July, Sebastian assessed the couple who’d just taken the seats across from him in his office at Beckett Memorial.
Timothy and Megan Ackerman, both around his age, were sitting in the two chairs no parent wanted to sit in. All the parents who sat in those chairs were forced to face one of the worst things that can happen to a person—the life-threatening sickness of their child.
A sonogram in the middle of Megan’s second trimester had shown that their daughter, Isabella, had a combination of heart problems, including a faulty ventricle. Less than a week ago, at thirty-six weeks of gestation, the doctors in their hometown recognized that Isabella’s heart was starting to fail, so they delivered her by emergency C-section. Once testing confirmed that her heart was dangerously malformed, Isabella had been transported here. For the past several days, the PICU staff had worked to stabilize her. She’d been on a ventilator, sedated, with tubes carrying medicine into her bloodstream. Tomorrow Sebastian and his team would operate.
“The environment in utero is very supportive of babies with congenital heart defects,” Sebastian said. This situation was so upsetting and foreign to parents that they didn’t always grasp the information they were receiving. Prior to surgery, he met with parents for as long as was needed to make sure he had their informed consent and that they understood the options and risks. “The environment outside the uterus is much less kind. We’ve been giving Isabella prostaglandins, which have helped us replicate the benefits she was receiving before birth. However, the benefits they provide won’t fix anything, and they only last so long. Which is why we’re moving forward with surgery.”
Megan’s skin was pale, her eyes grim.
“I wish that we could repair Isabella’s heart through surgery, but we can’t,” Sebastian continued. “The best we can do tomorrow is put temporary fixes in place that will hopefully keep her heart functioning until a donor heart can be found, and we can perform a heart transplant.”
“Okay,” Timothy said.
“I’ll seat a band around her pulmonary artery, ligate her duct, and install a pacemaker.” Sebastian slid a diagram from his desk drawer and explained the procedures.
They listened, their posture tight with desperation. Sebastian knew that whatever part of their focus was here with him, the larger part was with their baby in the PICU.
Timothy looked like he could’ve played on the defensive line of his high school football team. He had a sandy brown beard and kind eyes.
Megan wore a maternity shirt that reminded Sebastian that she’d given birth just a few days before. As terrible as she must be feeling emotionally, she couldn’t be feeling great physically, either. Her blond hair was short in back, but her bangs were long and swept to the side around an earnest face.
Markie had already informed him that Timothy and Megan had been waiting and praying through infertility for four years. They’d gone through two in vitro fertilization treatments and been ecstatic when they’d conceived Isabella, their first baby.
The baby they’d waited and prayed for would soon be wheeled into the operating room to have her chest opened.
“If you were us, would you opt for your child to have this surgery?” Megan asked. She searched his face for guarantees.
Sometimes, this question wasn’t easy to answer. Sometimes parents faced two choices with evenly matched advantages and disadvantages. This was not one of those times. This surgery was Isabella’s only hope. “Absolutely.”
“Do you think she’ll make it through?” Megan asked.
“I think she will make it through, yes.”
“We’re Christians,” she said. “And we believe that God is still in the business of doing miracles.”
Sebastian nodded.
“He did a miracle for you once,” she said. “Right?”
“Right.” Clearly, they’d researched him and learned about the earthquake.
“Are you a believer?”
“Yes.” Sebastian didn’t elaborate, though he wanted to remind them that God didn’t often provide miracles on cue. In fact, only occasionally did He answer prayers for critically ill humans by healing them here on earth.
“It’s clear to us that God chose you to be Isabella’s doctor.” Megan glanced at Timothy, then back at Sebastian.
“We’d like to move forward with the surgery,” Timothy said.
“The two of us, our family, and our church will all be praying for Isabella and for you, Dr. Grant. We’re trusting the Lord to bring her through the surgery and, eventually, to give her a whole new heart.”