Let It Be Me, Becky Wade [beautiful books to read .TXT] 📗

idea that she could have missed out on the chance to further her education because she’d been switched at birth.

She still had every intention of furthering her education when Dylan left for college. She’d take as many courses as she could handle time-wise, while continuing to work, and money-wise, while contributing to Dylan’s tuition. Eventually, she’d achieve her PhD. She would. It’s just that, to get there, she’d have to climb a challenging uphill path. The prestigious, fully funded route of years ago was gone.

She shoveled more nuts into her mouth.

It was too soon to think about her doctoral work. Nearly a year remained until Dylan’s graduation. For now, her primary focus was to ensure that he made it to his freshman dorm room in one piece and well prepared for independence.

With God’s help, she and Dylan had come a long way together. With God’s help, they’d cross the remaining distance.

A snide voice within her sneered, He’s not even your brother.

“Yes he is,” she whispered to the empty room. The mighty ties of love and loyalty that bound her to him had not changed. The truest truth of her life was that she’d love Dylan always. Unconditionally.

The things she’d learned today didn’t have to mean that Sophie had been the beneficiary of the switch and Leah the loser . . . because Leah had gotten Dylan, and she wouldn’t relinquish him for anything. She’d chosen his well-being above Princeton, and she’d chosen rightly. She didn’t regret it. Given the same set of circumstances, she’d make the same decision.

It would serve her well to remember that none of the ramifications of the switch were Sophie’s fault. She and Sophie had been minutes old when the mistake had occurred. Both of them helpless newborns. Victims. Sophie had been robbed of the opportunity to grow up with her biological family just like Leah had.

She should feel kinship with Sophie. And she did. . . .

It’s just that she felt a bit of hostility toward her, too.

How many nuts had she just eaten? Hopefully not half the can. She set them back on the shelf and returned to the dining room to Google Jonathan Brookside.

She hadn’t been able to find anything on him last week, but she’d given up after the first three or four pages of hits. This time, she’d dig deeper.

Sure enough, on the eleventh page of hits, she came upon two future-casting articles attributed to Jonathan Brookside, Founder, Gridwork Communications Corporation. The pieces were both well written. One article had appeared six years ago, the other eight. She had no way of confirming if this was her Jonathan, because no information was given about his age or family status.

She went to Gridwork Communications Corporation’s website and learned that they were a computer services company located in Atlanta. It made sense that a man who’d lived in Atlanta in young adulthood might have founded a business in the same city.

Carefully, she deleted her browser history in case Dylan attempted to snoop.

She and her brother were about to leave on their epic road trip. Her goal for their time away: to rest and to fill her days with new places and experiences. She refused to let this thing with her past distract her so much that she couldn’t enjoy the vacation she’d spent six months planning.

Fate, destiny, paternity were weighty issues. Twenty-eight years had gone by without her knowing anything about the Brooksides. It wouldn’t hurt to give herself time to strategize her next move.

One afternoon in mid-July, Sebastian assessed the couple who’d just taken the seats across from him in his office at Beckett Memorial.

Timothy and Megan Ackerman, both around his age, were sitting in the two chairs no parent wanted to sit in. All the parents who sat in those chairs were forced to face one of the worst things that can happen to a person—the life-threatening sickness of their child.

A sonogram in the middle of Megan’s second trimester had shown that their daughter, Isabella, had a combination of heart problems, including a faulty ventricle. Less than a week ago, at thirty-six weeks of gestation, the doctors in their hometown recognized that Isabella’s heart was starting to fail, so they delivered her by emergency C-section. Once testing confirmed that her heart was dangerously malformed, Isabella had been transported here. For the past several days, the PICU staff had worked to stabilize her. She’d been on a ventilator, sedated, with tubes carrying medicine into her bloodstream. Tomorrow Sebastian and his team would operate.

“The environment in utero is very supportive of babies with congenital heart defects,” Sebastian said. This situation was so upsetting and foreign to parents that they didn’t always grasp the information they were receiving. Prior to surgery, he met with parents for as long as was needed to make sure he had their informed consent and that they understood the options and risks. “The environment outside the uterus is much less kind. We’ve been giving Isabella prostaglandins, which have helped us replicate the benefits she was receiving before birth. However, the benefits they provide won’t fix anything, and they only last so long. Which is why we’re moving forward with surgery.”

Megan’s skin was pale, her eyes grim.

“I wish that we could repair Isabella’s heart through surgery, but we can’t,” Sebastian continued. “The best we can do tomorrow is put temporary fixes in place that will hopefully keep her heart functioning until a donor heart can be found, and we can perform a heart transplant.”

“Okay,” Timothy said.

“I’ll seat a band around her pulmonary artery, ligate her duct, and install a pacemaker.” Sebastian slid a diagram from his desk drawer and explained the procedures.

They listened, their posture tight with desperation. Sebastian knew that whatever part of their focus was here with him, the larger part was with their baby in the PICU.

Timothy looked like he could’ve played on the defensive line of his high school football team. He had a sandy brown beard and kind eyes.

Megan wore a maternity shirt that reminded Sebastian that she’d