Pete looked up and gave me a tender smile, but didn’t stop what he was doing. “Mummy’s here,” he said to the incubator. I got there, peered in, and saw Theo.
It should have been a big moment. The way everyone talks about the maternal bond, that bottomless pit of gushy love people go on about, if for some reason you don’t feel an immediate, overwhelming connection to your baby there must be something wrong with you. But I didn’t. I simply recoiled. I’d somehow expected from Pete’s positive updates that Theo would look like a real baby now. But this stranger’s wizened face seemed a hundred years old rather than newborn. Dark, downy hair covered his shoulders, like a little monkey. He was wearing the tiniest nappy I’d ever seen, and he was tucked into a kind of ramshackle nest of comforters and bedding. Electrical pads were stuck to his chest, and a cuff around his left foot glowed red—that was the oxygen sensor, I learned later. His arms and legs were stick-thin, the limbs of a famine victim.
A clear plastic tube went up one tiny nostril—the same tube Pete was gently squeezing breast milk into the other end of. “Shouldn’t a nurse be doing that?” I said anxiously.
“They’re busy. Besides, I like doing it for him. It makes me feel useful.”
“Did you check the pH, Pete?” an Irish voice called. I looked up. A nurse, dark and pretty, was speaking to him from across a nearby incubator.
“Two point five.”
“Good man,” she said approvingly. Then, to me, “Are you Mum?”
I’ve always found the way medical staff call every mother Mum and every infant Baby, instead of the mum and the baby, slightly grating, but I know that’s pedantic of me. “Yes. Maddie.”
“Welcome to the NICU, Maddie. I know it must seem overwhelming at first, but little Theo’s doing really well.” With her Irish accent, his name came out as Teo. “And Pete’s been a total star. If only all husbands were that handy with the NG tube.”
“We’re not actually married,” I said automatically.
“Sorry, my bad—all partners. Don’t let him get away, though. He’s a catch, that one.”
It was just the friendly banter of someone trying to put me at my ease, I knew. But something about it irritated me, perhaps because I still felt a failure for not being able to carry Theo to term. Plus, there was the realization that, while I’d been lying in a cushy private room, Pete had been quietly coping—no, more than coping, excelling—here in the brutal environment of the NICU. Generally, I’d have said Pete isn’t brilliant in an emergency. But put him in a situation like that, a situation that requires steadfastness and determination, and he comes into his own. It should have made me feel proud and grateful. But actually, it just made me feel even more guilty.
Pete saw me looking at the monitors. “They start to make sense eventually,” he said.
It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to make sense of them. “What do you mean?”
He indicated the nearest one. “The wavy line is his heartbeat, and the big number is beats per minute. Anything less than a hundred is a braddie—if that happens, try to get his heart going again with a stroke or pat. The one that goes 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.