Let It Be Me by Becky Wade (top young adult novels .TXT) 📕

Venezuela. A tablecloth from Thailand. Those items had been colorful, but they’d also reinforced the message Mom had communicated in a million subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Namely, I’d rather be anywhere other than here.

How different would her childhood have been, had Leah grown up in this place?

Very different.

Memory-laden minutes slid past.

She had enough familiarity with Zillow.com from when she’d been shopping for a house in Misty River to know that the site provided data on a property’s prior sales. She accessed the site on her phone and ran a search. After some scrolling and clicking, she discovered that this house had been purchased by new owners five times since the year of her birth.

In fact, it had been sold just four years after she’d been born, ostensibly by Trina and Jonathan, if they’d been owners and not renters when they’d lived here. Either way, Trina and Jonathan hadn’t resided here in a long, long time.

She was glad she’d come, nonetheless. This detour had provided insight into her biological mother and father and what her upbringing might have been like had they been the ones to raise her.

Her family life hadn’t been wretched. Her needs had been met. That said, her family life hadn’t been as pretty as the picture this house presented, either.

Just because the house looks ideal on the outside doesn’t mean that the Brooksides’ life was ideal, Leah.

Yes, but what if the family life on the inside did match the ideal on the outside? If so, how was she supposed to reconcile herself to that?

When Leah arrived home from Atlanta that evening, her house welcomed her with silence and a lingering whiff of pineapple from her unlit candle. Dylan was gone, hanging out with his friend Braxton.

She hurried to her computer the way she’d hurried to Math Olympiad contests in fifth grade and opened Facebook. She hoped the Brooksides were the type of people who, unlike her, shared their lives often and freely on social media without regard for privacy settings.

She entered Trina Wallace Brookside into the search bar. Only one of the results looked like she could be the right fit. However, Leah opted to rule out the more unlikely candidates first. A few of them were too young. One had been born in England and lived there still.

Finally, anticipation mounting, she brought up the most likely Trina. The woman had created a close-up profile picture from her larger cover photo. The photo captured her solo, standing on a balcony overlooking a beautiful Italian-looking town. She was half turned to the camera with a relaxed smile.

Leah went still. Trina’s face was lined with years, but her facial structure, height, and body type were very similar to Leah’s. She’d styled her blond hair in a long bob that was slightly shorter in back than in the front. She wore a navy-and-white-striped boatneck shirt with roomy sleeves.

Unfortunately for Leah’s purposes, Trina was indeed someone who had regard for privacy settings. She’d made zero information about herself available to people she hadn’t approved as Facebook friends.

Leah typed Sophie Brookside into the search bar. Again, she knew at once, from the picture alone, who her Sophie was. Again, she eliminated the others first before visiting her Sophie’s page.

The circular profile picture of Sophie (Brookside) Robbins revealed a lovely brunette. For her cover photo, she’d chosen an outdoor wedding shot. In it, she was beaming at the camera while holding the hand of her good-looking groom. She’d chosen a strapless wedding dress and knotted her hair into a sophisticated style at the nape of her neck. The veil attached to the top of her bun extended into the breeze in a whimsical line. Her groom regarded her with a besotted grin.

Sophie was slender, stylish, and, judging by this photo, terrifically happy.

Leah had never wanted to marry! Even so, a slither of jealousy snaked around her ribs and squeezed.

Was Sophie (Brookside) Robbins living the life Leah was supposed to have lived?

Was Leah the one who’d been intended for the gown, the veil, the groom? But instead had become, because of all the “nurture” factors in the “nature vs. nurture” equation, the one supporting her brother on a teacher’s salary?

Like her mother, Sophie shared no personal details with those outside her circle of friends.

Leah opened Instagram and hunted for Trina and Sophie there. She only found Sophie, who’d used the same wedding photo on Instagram as on Facebook. Here again, she maintained a private account. Leah tried the remaining social media platforms but wasn’t able to find them.

She surfed back to Trina and Sophie’s Facebook pages and spent more time absorbing the images.

Upon further reflection, she did not feel that she’d been intended for a gown, veil, and groom. But she did feel—very strongly—that she was intended for a PhD. It had been her dream since Ms. Santiago, her second-grade teacher, had told her about the career paths open to academics.

If she’d gone home from the hospital with Trina and Jonathan, she might have been free to follow through on Princeton’s PhD offer. She might be teaching at a university right now. Writing papers, giving lectures, meeting with students.

Grief sent her bolting into the kitchen. She opened a can of mixed nuts and munched while her mind churned. With one hand, she scooped up more nuts, with the other, she slid her phone from her pocket and indulged in her guilty pleasure—browsing the digital album where she kept the dozens of pictures of Princeton she’d collected over the years.

She had so many pictures of the school, and had studied them all so carefully, that she probably knew the campus and the college’s history better than most of their incoming students.

She never could decide if these pictures were a healthy way to process her loss or an unhealthy fixation on her loss.

Both?

She could bear without too much difficulty the idea that she may have missed out on a wedding because she’d been switched at birth. But it was much harder to bear the