NOT MINE
“How dare he!”
Clare Mowbray slammed her handbag onto Leona’s polished desk with the kind of rage that vibrated through the whole office. A gold clasp snapped off. Leona blinked but said nothing. She was used to clients storming in like hurricanes. But Clare’s fury was molten.
“He has the absolute nerve to accuse me of cheating—cheating! After everything I’ve done for that man? After I birthed his child? After I stayed through his self-help phase, his unemployment phase, and his bloody hair-loss therapy? He thinks I strayed?”
Leona sat perfectly still, legs crossed, pen uncapped. She had learned to listen before judging. But Clare wasn’t done.
“I want full custody. I want him to never see Ethan again. I want child support, backdated. And I want him to feel the sting of losing his family.”
Leona nodded slowly. “You mentioned he said something about a paternity test?”
Clare scoffed. “Yes. He ordered one behind my back. A cheap one from the bloody internet. Said the boy’s hair is too—too wavy or something. And get this—‘blonde.’ As if that’s a crime now.”
Leona finally looked up. “You and Julian are both brunettes with blue eyes, yes?”
“Yes! Obviously.” Clare crossed her arms and sat. “Ethan’s hair is sandy-blonde. And curly. What, kids don’t mutate now and then? We’re both white. It’s not like I gave birth to a giraffe.”
Leona flipped open the manila folder Julian had sent over. Inside, the test results. Not legally binding, but troubling.
“Clare, I’ll be blunt with you. This test, while non-court-certified, shows Julian is not the biological father.”
Clare rolled her eyes. “He faked it.”
“Possibly. But... have you ever done a test yourself?”
Clare’s eyes narrowed. “Why would I? I carried that boy for nine months. I had stitches. I’ve got a C-section scar I still lotion every night.”
Leona tapped her pen against her lips. “Clare, I don’t doubt your delivery. But genes don’t lie. And—” she turned her monitor toward her, clicking open a side-by-side photo comparison “—Ethan’s hair texture, eye color, and facial structure are beginning to raise genetic questions.”
“You sound like him now.”
“I sound like a lawyer trying to protect you from a worse surprise in court.” Leona paused, then added gently, “Humor me. Let’s do a maternity test. Just to knock it off the table. It won’t hurt.”
Clare hesitated.
“And if I am his mother?” she asked, voice quivering.
“Then we go after Julian for slander and emotional distress. But if you’re not—” Leona let the silence complete the sentence.
Leona knew Claire. She wasn’t the type to Cheat. Even when they were teens Clare refused to date and even got married as a virgin…
Two Weeks Later
The envelope arrived by courier. Leona’s receptionist, Georgina, knocked once and left it on her desk. The results were sealed.
Clare sat across from her, quieter now. Her hands shook as she held a lukewarm cappuccino.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she whispered. “I just kept thinking... what if someone tampered with the hospital records? Or the DNA database is wrong? What if there’s some lab contamination?”
Leona said nothing. She tore the seal and read.
Her face fell. Subtly. But Clare noticed.
“No...” Clare said, barely audible.
Leona looked up, solemn. “Clare... the test confirms it. You are not genetically related to Ethan.”
Clare’s world went still.
“What does that even mean?” she asked, shaking. “I had a baby. I held him. I breastfed. I—I had that stupid balloon arch at the christening.”
Leona took a breath. “It means something went wrong. At the hospital. Most likely.” She was the only one who was thinking logically now. Clare was pensive!
“Someone gave me the wrong child?”
“I believe so.”
Clare covered her mouth with both hands. Her coffee slipped from her lap and pooled at her feet. She didn’t notice.
“I’ve loved a child... who isn’t mine?”
“No. You do love him. That hasn’t changed.”
But Clare wasn’t listening. Her body began to tremble. “Then where’s my real son?”
Later That Evening – Leona’s Apartment
Leona poured herself a glass of white wine and spread the documents across her dining table. She began charting the unthinkable.
·Ethan — born February 18, 2021 at Woolmore Hospital, East London.
·Hospital shift records — show two deliveries in the same time slot, same wing. One mother had preeclampsia, the other an emergency C-section.
·Initial midwife logs — digitized incorrectly. Two infants marked with the same ID tag, later corrected by hand.
Leona’s legal mind whirred.
She pulled up the online public court records database.
Search terms: custody disputes + paternity mismatch + Woolmore Hospital.
Three hits in the past 14 months. One was Danika Shaw.
She clicked. Danika had sued her ex-husband for abandonment when he left, citing he wasn’t the child’s father. Her case fell apart. DNA tests revealed He wasn’t the Biological Father.
Three months later, she was dead.
A suicide. Her husband then returned to claim the child but she was taken to a foster home. It was a tragic scenario.
Leona’s hand tightened around her wine glass.
Something deeper was happening.
And someone was covering their tracks.
Woolmore Hospital was a soulless box of off-white panels and glass, perched between a shuttered pharmacy and a newly opened Costa. From the outside, it looked like progress. Inside, it smelled of paperwork, panic, and antiseptic.
Leona adjusted her ID badge—Welfare Audit Officer, Children & Family Services Division—printed on high-grade cardstock with just enough laminate to look real but not suspicious.
She approached the reception desk with the calm of a woman used to power.
“Hi. I’m here on behalf of the welfare compliance audit committee—long-term review of postnatal systems and data retention. Just a routine sweep, nothing scary.”
The nurse behind the desk, a young woman with copper braids and skeptical eyes, glanced at the ID.
“Welfare... You’re not Child Care Service?”
“Nope,” Leona smiled. “Nothing to do with schools. Just child health and delivery patterns.”
Still suspicious, the nurse eventually buzzed her through to Records and Archives in the basement.
The records clerk was an older woman named Valerie, hair in a net, fingers yellowed from years of nicotine. She led Leona into a dry, cold room filled with cabinets that still ran on manual codes and folders arranged by delivery date.
“You’ll have to sign the access log,” Valerie said. “This is for internal audits only.”
“Of course.”
Leona signed “L. Carter” with a flourish, leaving her real surname in plain sight but not enough to trigger anything official.
The Request
“I need three things,” Leona said.
Valerie arched a brow.
“Birth records from 2000 to 2022. Names of all personnel—doctors, midwives, nurses, and support staff—who worked in delivery during that window.”
Valerie hesitated.
“And?”
“Also,” Leona continued, casually flipping open her leather folder, “I’d like records of antenatal patients registered at Woolmore Hospital who never delivered here—patients who either transferred out or gave birth elsewhere.”
Valerie frowned. “That’s not exactly public.”
Leona leaned in. “We’re cross-referencing care continuity breakdowns. Standard welfare check.”
With a grunt and a reluctant motion, Valerie unlocked the tall cabinet and rolled out the drawers.
“You’ve got until 6 p.m. After that, I lock up.”
The records were spread across her kitchen island, color-coded, flagged, and noted.
80+ births flagged with staff inconsistencies.
She focused on children born around February 2021, Ethan’s birth month.
There were several suspicious trends:
·Three families had contested paternity. Two eventually divorced.
·One baby had two different mothers listed on internal vs. NHS registry logs.
·Multiple files showed handwritten corrections of baby ID tags in the delivery room logs.
But the real shock came from antenatal records.
She matched every patient who registered for antenatal care but delivered elsewhere. Every. Single. One. of those births had no paternity dispute, no legal issues, no recorded anomalies.
The pattern was chilling.
Then she cross-matched delivery room shifts.
Between 2015 and 2022, only one nurse had worked all the flagged deliveries with postnatal identity issues.
Her name: Margot Drennan.
A midwife turned nurse manager. Retired two years ago.
Leona’s fingers trembled as she pulled the remaining file on Ethan’s birth.
It was half photocopied.
·The baby photo strip had been detached.
·The mother’s consent form was missing.
·A handwritten note in red ink said: “Corrected ID tag - per Drennan, 3:48am.”
But it wasn’t Drennan’s signature.
It was someone else’s. Someone whose name had been scratched out and overwritten twice.
Someone who wasn’t supposed to be on shift.
There was a smell to this — a rotting one — of forged documents, cancelled forms, and years of bureaucratic blind spots.
And Leona now had an undeniable connection between nurse Margot Drennan and the identity issues of multiple children.
She sat back on the kitchen floor, records all around her.
Her wall now had a crime-board style map—strings of red thread connecting names, photos, and staff rosters.
In the middle: Ethan. Clare. Margot. Danika Shaw.
At the corner of her laptop, she noticed a forgotten sticky note she’d scribbled earlier that week.
“Who else loved a child that wasn’t theirs?”
