I just stood there holding the top of my dress against my chest because at first I honestly thought Ryan was joking. He kept staring at my stomach like he’d seen something impossible.
Then he started crying harder.
Not angry crying either. Panicked.
He kept saying, “This can’t be right,” over and over while backing toward the bathroom. I asked him what the hell was wrong with him, and finally he asked if I had some kind of surgery scar I never told him about.
I said yes. Appendectomy when I was sixteen.
He looked sick after that.
Apparently his mother had shown him photos years ago from a baby girl supposedly switched at birth with his older sister at the county hospital in 1994. The family spent years quietly convinced the real daughter was still somewhere nearby because of a malpractice rumor involving one nurse.
The identifying mark in those photos was a small scar low on the abdomen from emergency surgery as a teenager.
Mine.
I told him his mother was insane.
He agreed she probably was, but then he admitted something worse. His parents pushed hard for us to start dating after church because his mother became convinced I might be “the missing girl.” Ryan thought it was ridiculous at first and never planned to tell me.
But while he was helping me out of my dress, he saw the scar.
Then he whispered something I still haven’t processed completely.
He said his mother also made him promise never to have children with me until they were absolutely sure we weren’t related somehow.