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.