After disconnecting, she stood immobile, her ballet flats planted on a flagstone paver. Stalwart trees encircled her.
The story of her conception was well-known to her and somewhat south of disappointing. Her mom and dad had fallen in love while attending Georgia State. Mom had become pregnant the summer before her senior year. Even though Mom had dreamed since childhood of traveling around the globe, she’d instead settled down, married Dad, and had Leah.
Why would a young woman who longed for independence and adventure adopt a child at the age of twenty-two? After nine months of pregnancy? Leah had seen the photos that documented her mother’s pregnancy.
Had Mom been pregnant and lost the baby tragically?
Then gone on to adopt her? And kept her adoption a secret?
If something bizarre like that had occurred, why would Mom have given her a DNA kit as a gift, knowing what Leah would discover?
Was the DNA kit Mom’s warped way of revealing to Leah that she’d been adopted?
That sort of subterfuge sounded nothing like Erica Everly Montgomery, her mother. Mom said things outright—unafraid of what people thought, uncowed by confrontation.
Leah hadn’t been adopted, surely.
And yet . . . It was true that she’d never had a great deal in common with the rest of her immediate family. Her father, mother, and brother had brown hair and brown eyes. All three were more athletic than she was, messier than she was, grumpier than she was. None of them were interested in academics, the joy of Leah’s life.
Even so, she hadn’t imagined that her otherness had anything to do with genetics. A lot of people felt as though they didn’t fit within their families. She’d simply concluded herself to be the odd one out.
Until now.
I received the results from the YourHeritage DNA test kit you gave me for my birthday,” Leah told her mom on Sunday evening. “You’re not listed as my mother and no Everly or Montgomery relatives are listed as matches.”
Silence multiplied between them.
Leah had been gnawing over this for two days—two days!—while she’d waited for Mom to return her call. She’d practically given herself arthiritis in the knees thanks to the time she’d spent kneeling and praying.
“That’s ridiculous,” Mom stated emphatically. “I’m your mother.”
“Not according to my DNA.”
As soon as Leah had answered her phone, she’d shut herself into her car inside her one-car garage so Dylan couldn’t overhear. In sharp constrast to Leah’s surroundings, her mother was currently in Guinea, working on an agroforestry project. On the other end of the call, Leah pictured orange earth, palm trees, and huts. Mom had likely clothed her sinewy body in safari khaki. Her curls, which matched Dylan’s, would be zigzagging from her head, and her close-set eyes and long face would be pinched with consternation.
As usual, contact with her mom submerged Leah in a complex mix of resentment, love, and resignation.
“Two weeks before your due date, I started bleeding,” Mom said. “My back hurt. My belly hurt. We rushed to the hospital, and they diagnosed me with placental abruption.”
This information was not revelatory. Leah had gone through a phase in elementary school when she’d been obsessed with her origin story and had peppered her parents with questions about her birth and herself as a baby. “The placenta had pulled away from your uterus,” Leah said.
“Right, which is dangerous. They worried that you might not be getting enough oxygen, so they put me under and performed an emergency C-section. I have the scar to prove it!”
“I’ve seen the scar.”
“Of course you have.”
“I’m trying to reconcile all of that with the only logical explanation for my DNA results, which is that you adopted me.”
“You can’t always trust logic.”
“On the contrary, the wonderful thing about logic is that you can always trust it. So I began to wonder . . . What if your baby didn’t survive the placental abruption? And, in your grief, you adopted me?”
“I most certainly did not adopt you, Leah. The emergency C-section saved you. They placed you in my arms shortly after I regained consciousness.”
Leah remained quiet.
“Why in the world would I have adopted a baby?” Mom demanded, gathering steam. “I was trying to finish college at the time that I had you. I wanted to see the world! I wanted to travel. I was not ready for children. You know this about me.”
“I do.”
“I did not adopt you.”
“And yet we’re not related by blood. How do you propose to explain this?”
“Clearly the lab made a mistake.”
“My DNA matches include people with surnames like Brookside and Donnell and May. Do you recognize any of those?”
“I don’t. Listen, humans are involved in the process of DNA testing. If humans are involved, there’s the possibility of human error. I’m guessing that your test tube was mistaken for someone else’s test tube. Will YourHeritage let you retest?”
“They will.”
“Good. Make sure they expedite your retest since this was their mistake.”
Leah swallowed a sigh. Her intuition did not think this was the lab’s mistake. “A new test kit is already en route to me. Once I send it in, I should hear back in less than two weeks.”
“Tell them to give us our money back for both tests. They owe us that after the trouble they’ve caused.” She didn’t wait for Leah to reply before saying,“I’m off!”
Mom’s words hung in Leah’s ear as the line went dead.
If Mom had not adopted her, then only one theory remained that honored both her mom’s version of events and the DNA test.
That theory: her mother’s biological child had been switched at birth with someone else’s baby.
CHAPTER TWO
Farmers markets were not his thing.
And yet, there he was. Sebastian Xavier Grant slipped on sunglasses as he walked from his parking space toward Misty River High School’s athletic fields and rows of vendors shaded by pop-up canopies.
He’d come to this particular farmers market for one reason only: to support his best friend, Ben. An eleventh-grade science teacher, Ben was responsible for staffing every volunteer position at today’s market, which was
