I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet, my phone in my lap, staring at the ceiling. For 28 years, my father called my mother a cheater. For 28 years, he was wrong about the affair. But he was right about one thing. I wasn’t his daughter.
The question was, whose daughter was I?
I drove to my parents’ house the next morning, timing my arrival for 10:00 a.m. Late enough that Gerald would be at his golf game. Early enough that my mother would still be in her robe drinking Earl Gray in the sun room. She looked up when I walked in and her face immediately creased with concern.
“Tori, what’s wrong?”
I sat down across from her and handed her my phone with the gene trust report on the screen. I watched her read it. I watched the color drain from her face, watched her lips move silently as she read the numbers again and again. When she finally looked up, her eyes were wild.
“This is wrong,”
she whispered.
“This has to be wrong.”
“I called the lab, triple checked everything. There’s no mistake, Mom.”
“But I gave birth to you.”
Her voice rose, cracking on the edges.
“I was in labor for 14 hours. I felt you come out of my body. I saw you, Tori. You were red and screaming and mine.”
I took her hands in mine. They were ice cold.
“I believe you,”
I said.
“Which means there’s only one explanation. Something happened at the hospital. Someone switched us.”
The silence stretched between us like a wire about to snap.
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