The Lying Game by Tess Stimson Page B

fade
completely
in twenty-four hours?’
    Oh God! How had she not remembered this? He was right. They’d both remarked on it at the time, how quickly the birthmark had vanished. Overnight, in fact. And then they’d forgotten
about it, too caught up in the chaos of new parenthood to give it another thought.
    Somewhere out there was a little girl who
had
gone home with a birthmark.
Their daughter.
    ‘The first night in the hospital,’ she’d said, piecing it together. ‘You’d gone home to sleep. The fire alarm went off. Florence was in the nursery. I tried to go
to her, but the nurses said it was just a false alarm, told us all to go back to bed. But they were all running around, no one knew what was happening—’
    ‘Florence is our daughter,’ he’d interrupted as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘We’ve loved her and raised her for fifteen years. I’m her father. You’re
her mother. That’s all that matters.’
    ‘Our
child
is out there!’ she’d cried then. ‘The baby I carried inside me for nine months! We can’t just ignore that!’
    ‘Yes we can.’
    She’d stared at him incredulously. ‘Oliver, we can’t just pretend this hasn’t happened! We can’t just abandon her! She’s our daughter!’
    ‘No!
Florence
is our daughter!’
    ‘Of course she is! I love her as much as you do. Nothing’s going to change that. But we have another daughter somewhere out there, a child who’s
part
of us.’ The
tears were falling now, fast and hot on her hands. ‘We’ve got no idea where she is, Oliver, how she is, what kind of family she’s with—’
    ‘Precisely.’ His tone had softened. ‘Harriet, we have no idea what kind of family she’s with, or what they might make of all of this. Have you thought through what might
happen if we try to find her? Suppose we track down the people who have our biological child – and that’s a big
if
right there. People move, women marry, change their names . .
. it wouldn’t be easy. But OK, suppose we found her. What do you think the other family might do?’
    ‘They’d be shocked, like we are, but then—’
    ‘Then what? Suppose they decided they wanted their daughter –
our
daughter, Florence – back? Suppose they decided to sue for custody?’
    ‘They couldn’t do that!’
    ‘We don’t know that. Right now, we don’t know anything. I’ve got no idea of the legal ramifications of this, and nor have you. God knows which court would have
jurisdiction or what they might decide. All I know is that if we leave well alone, we’ll never have to find out.’
    He wasn’t listening to her. He’d made up his mind. All he cared about was making this go away.
    ‘Please, Oliver.
Please.
We can’t just forget about it. Forget about
her.
I can’t, I
can’t,
not now I know.’
    ‘You’re the one who opened Pandora’s box!’ His voice had cracked. ‘Why couldn’t you have just left it alone?’
    ‘I told you,’ she’d whispered. ‘I had to
know.’
    ‘I
didn’t have to know!’ he’d cried furiously. ‘Don’t you realize what you’ve done? We have to keep this from Florence for the rest of her
life! I’m going to have to lie to my daughter again and again, look her in the eye and
lie
to her, just because
you
needed to know!’
    ‘What else could I do?’ she’d said helplessly.
    ‘Nothing,’ Oliver had shot back. ‘You could have done
nothing
.’
    The room had shrunk to the four feet between them, a distance that suddenly seemed unbridgeable.
    He’d crossed his arms, literally barring her from getting close. ‘Tell me, Harriet. All those stories you looked up online. How many of them had a happy ending?’
    She’d stared wretchedly at her hands, tears blurring her vision. The Czech babies: at nine months old, when the switch had been discovered, the authorities had decided it was in the best
interests of the children to be switched back. Nine months old! A baby knew you by then, reached out for you, smiled at you. Your love for