So why did this fresh confirmation lower onto her shoulders like a lead blanket?

She read back over every item—the doctor’s scrawl regarding the caesarean section, her mom’s blood pressure stats, the notes on the baby’s feeding times, the results of the pediatrician’s exam.

Her mother’s baby had been whisked from the delivery room to the nursery because of concerns over a rapid heartbeat. As far as Leah could tell, the baby’s heartbeat had stabilized quickly. The remainder of Mom’s stay at the hospital appeared ordinary.

Not a single detail pointed to the question of how. How had two babies been switched?

Leah tilted her head up. Trees conspired to crowd out most of the starry sky. It might not be possible to answer the question of how. But it should be possible to answer the question of who. Who were her mother and father?

She logged in at YourHeritage. Starting with the DNA matches that the site designated as her closest relatives, she’d been studying each person one by one. Many had opted to keep their information private. Some who’d made their family trees public had only used the site for genealogical purposes and therefore hadn’t included living relatives. Others had only traced one branch of their tree.

Borrowing and building on the research they’d made available, she’d been striving to assemble a master family tree for herself. It was laborious.

The site says this woman’s my second cousin. But how? Through whom? Who are her parents, siblings, and kids?

Given more time, however, she had faith that she’d be able to crack the code.

Two days later, she did.

Maybe.

She’d taken her computer on a breakfast date to The Grind Coffee Shop and was just finishing up a chai latte when she suddenly located a jackpot of a family tree.

It had not come from one of her closest DNA matches. It had come from a distant relation named Cheryl Brookside Patterson. An obvious overachiever and a woman after Leah’s own heart, Cheryl had made public the most thrillingly thorough family tree Leah had ever seen.

Section by section, Leah compared her fledgling tree with Cheryl’s enormous tree until—finally—she found the place where her tree overlaid with Cheryl’s tree exactly. If she slotted a man named Jonathan Brookside into her tree as her father, then the few matches she’d been able to determine fell into place.

Many of the people on Cheryl’s tree had been born in Connecticut. However, Jonathan had been born in Atlanta. He had no siblings. At the age of fifty-seven, he was certainly of the right generation to be her father.

It seemed she was . . . a Brookside.

No information beyond his birthdate and place of birth had been given. She ran a search for him at YourHeritage, then on Google, then on social media sites.