One of the nurses who’d cared for her as a newborn had called her!

The other two nurses, Bonnie and Tracy, had remained elusive. Leah’s continued attempts to locate Bonnie online had failed. Tracy hadn’t responded to her Facebook message.

Joyce Caffarella. Joyce was the one with the solid frame and the spiky platinum hair. Had she been fresh out of nursing school the year she’d started the first job she’d listed on LinkedIn, her age would now be hovering just above sixty.

Leah slung the messenger bag filled with work that needed grading into her Honda, then headed home. Dylan was still at practice, which meant she could place a return call in private.

Once she’d dumped her things on the kitchen counter, she took a few moments to gather herself and whisper a prayer. Gazing out the sliding doors that led to her back patio, she connected a call to Joyce.

Joyce answered almost instantly. Leah introduced herself and spent a few moments exchanging pleasantries with the outgoing older woman. There was no easy way to segue from thanks for taking the time to return my call to I was switched at birth on your watch, but Leah managed to convey the basics of her story.

“What?” Joyce squawked. “No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

“I’ve heard switched-at-birth stories, of course, but that type of a mistake is actually really, really uncommon. It’s blowing my mind to think that this happened to you during one of my shifts.”

“It’s true that cases like mine are extremely rare, but maybe not quite as rare as we thought a few years ago. Then, no one could easily test their DNA, so an unknown number of cases likely went undiscovered. Now we can inexpensively submit our DNA to a lab. I’ve watched interviews of two other people who discovered they were switched at birth the same way that I did.”

“Jiminy Cricket!” Joyce made a whoeee sound. “You said you were born twenty-eight years ago?”

“Yes, I turned twenty-eight this past February. By chance, do you remember anything about me? Or my parents, Erica and Todd Montgomery? Or my biological mother and father, Trina and Jonathan Brookside?”

“I’m sorry, hon. I don’t. I’ve been working in labor and delivery now for almost forty years. I’ve cared for so many mothers and babies. So many.”

“I understand.” The chance that one of the nurses would remember her or her parents had been a long shot. “I was switched with a baby named Sophie.” She explained the facts of her birth and Sophie’s birth.

“How close together were you born?”

“Eighteen minutes.”

Joyce gave another whoeee. “Sophie would have been brought to the nursery, too. And neither mother would have had a chance to get a good look at the face of her child.”

“Do you think it’s most likely that the switch occurred in the nursery?”