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Her thoughts pushing her up from her chair, Willow reached for the dish Asher still hadn’t served. She scooped portions out for each of them. With the drumbeat of two six-month-olds’ fists on high chair trays as background noise, she used tongs to place salad onto her plate and passed him the bowl. He went through the motions of giving himself some and even ate a little, but he seemed miles away from her kitchen table.
“Guess I should have told you it was store-bought if it’s that bad,” she said after several minutes.
Asher’s head jerked, his eyes widening. “What? Oh, I’m sorry. It’s delicious.”
He took another bite, pausing to savor it with closed eyes, before setting his fork aside.
“Well, good. I was worried I should give up cooking.”
He shook his head. “No, don’t do that. It’s just that I’m—I don’t know...”
“Furious? Worried? Scared?”
“D. All of the above. You don’t ever want to know what it’s like to want to protect your child from danger and have no idea where the danger is coming from.”
She understood that better than he thought, but then didn’t seem to be the time to remind him about the threats she’d faced. They seemed trivial when compared with the bogeyman coming after his family.
“Do you really think all those things are connected?” She twirled her fork in the remaining sauce on her plate as she considered it. “Because if they are, could the incidents happening here be somehow connected, as well? Maybe the same person?”
He didn’t answer, so she continued.
“No. That didn’t make any sense. We hadn’t even met when I received that letter. And the complaint had to have been filed before—”
Her breath caught, and her jaw went slack as another thought appeared like a too-close lightning flash. Slowly, she shifted to face Asher, whose eyes were as wide as hers had to be.
“The switch,” they announced together.
At the sharp sound of their parents’ voices, both infants stopped pounding long enough to look at them with wide eyes. Willow held her breath, waiting for the chorus of tears to begin, but Luna returned to her banging, and Harper played along.
In a lower voice, Willow spoke aloud the question that Asher had to be thinking, as well. “Is it possible that whoever is trying to hurt your family gave the phone tip about the switch? That maybe the girls weren’t switched at all? Like the bomb threat, maybe it’s just another hoax.”
Her words kept coming faster and at a higher pitch until her voice cracked over the last part.
Asher held out his hands above the table in front of him, fingers splayed, and bounced them, his hands never quite contacting the table in a signal for her to calm herself.
“No, I will not calm down.” She settled back in the chair, crossing her arms, her palms clammy against her biceps.
“Just wait,” he said. “Let’s think about this a minute. If someone called the hospital with a claim of a switch, why would they be so willing to believe them?”
He held up his hand. “Wait. Don’t answer that. Obviously, because the other allegation they’d received was later confirmed.”
Willow loosened her arms and rested her hands on the edge of the table. “Anne Sewall had no choice but to take the claim seriously until it could be disproven. Guilty until proven innocent.”
Asher pushed his nearly empty plate away and planted his elbows on the table, gripping his hands together and resting his chin on top of them. He rolled his lips, as if considering what she’d said.
“How would some outsider know that our daughters were born that day?”
“Ever heard of social media?”
“I’m not on it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Can you say that no one in your family posted anything the day that Harper was born? Selina Barnes Colton, public relations guru, didn’t blast a ‘welcome to the newest Colton’ on Colton Oil’s social media accounts?”
“She did,” he said with
a frown.
She studied him for several seconds. “Don’t you want the switch to be a lie? Or at least a mistake?”
