The Lying Game by Tess Stimson Page A

discovered for years. Two girls switched at birth in 1951 in a small town in Wisconsin hadn’t discovered the truth until they were forty-three years old. But mistakes like this did still
happen, even now. Only three years ago, two Russian women had discovered they’d been given the wrong daughters twelve years before. A few years before that, two newborn Czech girls had been
muddled up, and the mistake hadn’t come to light for nine months. And it wasn’t just Eastern Europe. In 2008, two mothers in Illinois had been given the wrong baby boys after
they’d been taken to be circumcised, and their bracelets had come off and been accidentally swapped. It happened. She couldn’t think how it had happened in London in 1998, but it had.
The DNA results were unequivocal. Florence May Lockwood was not related in any way to Oliver Peter Lockwood or to Harriet Jane Lockwood. She was not their biological child.
    It was unthinkable. Unbelievable. But Florence was not their daughter.
    She had entirely forgotten it was Florence’s prom that night until Oliver came into her study and found her still obsessively scouring the Internet. She’d quickly pulled up a work
spreadsheet so he wouldn’t see what she was doing as he chattered on and on about taking the kids to Flatbread Pizza. She had to tell him. But how? How could you tell the man you loved
something that would break his heart? Did he really need to know?
    But then he’d kissed her neck, stroked her shoulders, touched her in the way only he knew how, and she’d realized she couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep this lie from him. It
would always be there between them, eating away at their marriage. They’d always been honest with each other. It was a fundamental pillar of their relationship. Even as her body responded to
him, as he’d stripped her naked and moved inside her, she’d known she couldn’t keep her secret any longer and pushed him away.
    As he’d yanked on his trousers, furious and hurt, she’d laid it all out before him: the terrible, creeping doubt that had consumed her after Florence’s accident, about sending
off their toothbrushes, secretly, without consulting him, without asking him.
    And Ben. She’d had to tell him about Ben, since that was the starting point of all this.
    At first, that hadn’t seemed to matter. All he could focus on was Florence.
    ‘How?’
he’d demanded when he’d finally understood what she was saying to him, when he’d read the letter three, four, five times, as she had, and thrown it
back at her. ‘How can this have happened? I was with you when she was born! I held her, I even cut the cord! I watched them put the bracelet on her, I saw them bath her and wash her, I was
with her every second! How could there have been a mistake? Jesus Christ, that damn hospital identity bracelet is stuck in your bloody baby book! Mistakes like that just don’t happen these
days!’
    ‘They do,’ she’d said wearily. ‘You weren’t with Florence every second of every day. She went off to the nursery with all the other babies, remember? She was there
for three days. It could have happened at any time.’
    ‘But you
breastfed
her, Harriet! She came back to you every few hours! For God’s sake, wouldn’t you have
noticed
if you’d had the wrong baby?’
    You were her mother. What kind of mother doesn’t know her own child?
    He hadn’t said that, of course. He hadn’t needed to.
    ‘It was all so
new,’
she’d pleaded, knowing how weak it sounded. ‘It took me a while to get to know her. Everyone kept saying how much she looked like you when
we took her home, even you! Why
would
I think she wasn’t ours? How could I have known?’
    ‘Remember the stork-bite?’ he’d said suddenly. ‘That pink birthmark on the back of her neck?’
    ‘Of course—’
    ‘And how quickly it faded?’
    ‘The midwife said it would. It wasn’t a proper birthmark, it was just from the delivery.’
    ‘Yes, but to