off most often is oxygen desat. If you see that number starting to fall, check the prongs up his nose before you call the nurse—sometimes they work their way loose.”
I couldn’t imagine doing any of those things. “Have you held him yet?” I asked.
Pete nodded. “Just once, this morning—his temperature was too unstable before. It’s an amazing feeling, Mads. You have to be careful because of all the tubes and wires, obviously. But when he stretched out on my bare chest and opened his eyes at me, I choked up.”
“I think we all did.” That was the Irish nurse again. She looked up, smiling, from the other incubator. “That’s one of the best parts of doing this job—seeing a baby get skin-to-skin for the first time.”
Once again, I felt a small, unworthy flicker of irritation at the thought of a bare-chested weeping Pete, with this pretty dark-haired nurse kneeling next to him, crying too. I was careful not to let it show, though. Getting on with the staff here was clearly going to be important. So all I said was, “I can’t wait.”
8
PETE
WHILE MADDIE WAS ON the Tube, I’d done some quick research on my laptop. I briefly considered posting on DadStuff, which was my usual way of researching things, but thought better of it. Instead, still reeling, I googled Miles Lambert + Burton Investments. Miles’s LinkedIn page came up, although it didn’t tell me much except that he was three years older than me, he’d been to Durham University, his office was located in Berkeley Square, and his professional skills had been recommended as “excellent” by sixteen people. But at least it confirmed this wasn’t some kind of terrible prank. The DNA test, when I looked at it, seemed authentic, too—rows of numbers and technical language culminating in the words: Probability of paternity: 98%.
Next I searched swapped babies. It was clearly very rare—or at least, it was very rare for a swap to come to light. The switching of identical twins was discovered most often, presumably because the resemblance between two apparent strangers was more likely to be noticed. In 1992 a Canadian, Brent Tremblay, bumped into his identical twin, now called George Holmes, at university. In 2001 a similar thing happened to identical twins in the Canary Islands, and in 2015 two sets of identical twins were reunited in Bogotá. From these and other cases, combined with the incidence of twins in the general population, someone had calculated that mix-ups of less discoverable infants—that is, non-twins—could be as many as one in a thousand births, about the same as Down syndrome.
Other switches were discovered as a result of paternity testing when parents separated, as happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. The children involved in that case were three years old; the ensuing custody battle went on for years.
In 2006 two newborn girls were accidentally switched in the Czech Republic, with the mix-up discovered a year later. The girls were gradually reintroduced to their original families, by agreement of all four parents.
The son of a UK citizen was switched in a hospital in El Salvador in 2015. He, too, was reunited with his parents after a year.
In countries where switches were discovered there was often a public outcry leading to more stringent precautions, such as double tagging. That wasn’t the case in the UK, but there had been some similar problems with attempted baby abductions, and, as a result, security on NHS wards was considered above average.
There was no mention anywhere of what it was like in British private hospitals.
The thing that immediately jumped out at me, though, was that the decision to swap the children back or not was largely a matter of age. If they were over three when the switch was discovered, they usually ended up staying with their existing families. If they were twelve months or less, they were usually returned to their birth parents.
But two? Two years and two weeks, to be precise? That seemed to be a terrifyingly gray area.
Don Maguire’s words came back to me. There’s certainly no automatic requirement for the family courts to get involved. It’s best for the parents to work out a solution between themselves.
If we couldn’t work something out, did that mean a court would have to decide? Would Theo’s fate ultimately rest with some dry legal bureaucrat? The very thought made my blood run cold.
* * *
—
ALL OF THIS I explained, or rather babbled, to Maddie when she was barely through the door.
“But is that