Switched at Birth: The True Story of a Mother's Journey by Kathryn Kennish, ABC Family Page B

my daughter? she’s a stunner), and that was okay. The important thing, he explained, was that she always respected a boy’s feelings, and if she had to let him down, she should be as kind as possible in the process.
    “Teenage boys are a lot more fragile than they look,” he confided in her. “Just imagine how you’d want a girl to treat Toby. That’s how to handle it.”
    As advice goes, it remains among the best I’ve ever heard.
    Not long after Bay found out that she had a biological father—when we were frenetically trying to pull together the lawsuit against the hospital for mixing up the babies—I was crossing the driveway and happened to overhear Bay and John talking in her art studio.
    She was just finishing up a new piece she’d created by arranging masking tape on the canvas, then painting over it and removing the tape to reveal a series of brilliant white interconnecting lines and shapes. I’d seen it earlier that morning and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Bay’s work, like Bay herself, had a depth that belied the age of the artist. I knew I would come to some understanding of it eventually (or I’d break down and just ask Bay to explain it to me). But this was one of those pieces I’d need to think about for a while.
    “Hey,” said John, wandering into her studio. He had his hands in his pockets and he looked shy and boyish. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
    “Fine.”
    I heard his shoes scuffing across the cement floor, I guessed to get a better look at her work. “Nice use of color and line.”
    (Since “Art” wasn’t exactly John’s native language, I was impressed.)
    “So what I didn’t get to tell you the other night,” he continued, “is that the lawsuit has nothing to do with you. Your mom and I, we’re so lucky to have you in our lives. You make us look at the world differently. Like, like … that painting …”
    Uh oh , I thought. It was a good call on the line and color, pal, but don’t get cocky . One wrong word and you don’t get to finish this conversation....
    There was a brief silence in which I suspected he was taking a closer look at the canvas.
    “You took the word ‘MAN,’” John said with the confidence of a connoisseur, “and somehow turned it into an actual guy and a question mark at the same time.”
    A guy and a question mark , huh ? Go figure. I never would have guessed.
    “It’s amazing,” he went on. “And I have no idea how you came up with that.”
    “You saw that? The question mark?” Now Bay was the one who was impressed. And judging by her voice, very pleased as well. “I wasn’t sure anybody would get it.”
    “I don’t know if anybody would,” John said. “But I did.”
    I felt my throat tighten a little, and I left before the tears began. In just a few words, he’d summed it all up. Not anybody. Him. He was the one who would always see the things she needed him to see, the things other people couldn’t (or wouldn’t), the things no one but the man who drank tea with her from a tiny cup would ever get. They were connected—not by blood but by something far more magical. He was her hero. And in many ways, maybe now more than ever, she was his.
    Sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I find myself picturing Bay in an exquisite wedding dress—one utterly of her own choosing. I try not to picture it accessorized with combat boots, but with Bay, you never know. And if that’s what she wants, then honestly, it’s fine with me. I know she’ll look gorgeous no matter what.
    And in this picture in my mind, I see my husband, as proud as any father has ever been, walking his little girl down the aisle. But in the next moment my heart goes cold because into this beautiful image creeps a dark-eyed man—a man claiming that he should be the one holding Bay’s hand and beaming with pride.
    His name is Angelo. And he says that he is the father of the bride.
    But he isn’t. He can’t be. He never kicked a