Chapter 6: Daniel’s Age

Feeling utterly cornered after Marcus’s ultimatum, I knew I had to find something, anything, that could undermine the Finches’ narrative. My focus shifted back to Daniel, to the man I thought I knew, and the unsettling revelation from the “nursery records.” If Daniel was a junior intern during that fatal incident 20 years ago, what else didn’t I know about his past?

I started systematically going through Daniel’s personal effects, things I hadn’t touched since his death. His old desk in the study, filled with forgotten mementos. His closet, still smelling faintly of his cologne. It felt like an intrusion, sifting through the remnants of a life cut short, a life now shadowed by a disturbing secret.

Jax watched me sometimes, his young eyes curious, but I tried to explain it away as “getting things organized.” He was too young to understand the depth of the deception unfolding around us.

Most of Daniel’s official documents, his birth certificate, his university diplomas, were already in the hands of the Finch family’s lawyers. But there were personal items, boxes of old letters, college yearbooks, and a small, leather-bound photo album tucked away in a dusty corner of his closet. It was heavy, its pages filled with fading photographs.

I sat on the floor, surrounded by his memories, my fingers carefully turning the brittle pages. Pictures of Daniel as a mischievous toddler, a gangly teenager, a confident young man graduating from medical school. Most of them were formal, posed shots, but near the back, I found a section of candid, informal family snapshots. Scrawled dates in faded ink accompanied some of them.

One picture caught my eye. It was a photograph of a smiling, dark-haired baby, cradled in a woman’s arms. The woman was young, her face beaming. Bethany, much younger, stood beside her, grinning. Arthur, looking stern but proud, stood behind them.

The date written underneath, in what I recognized as Daniel’s mother’s handwriting, read: “Summer, 20 years ago. Our beautiful Daniel, 6 months old.”

My heart leaped into my throat. Six months old. Twenty years ago.

I immediately grabbed Daniel’s official birth certificate, the one I had copied before the Finches took it. The birth date listed on it perfectly aligned with him being approximately six months old exactly 20 years ago. This was Daniel as a baby, 6 months old, 20 years ago.

But wait. My mind raced back to the incident report. “Critical Infant Mix-up – Fatal.” And “Daniel Finch, Junior Intern, present on unit.”

A junior intern. At most, a junior intern would be 22-25 years old. If the mix-up happened 20 years ago, and Daniel was a six-month-old baby at the time, he couldn’t have been a junior intern then. He would have been an infant in the nursery himself.

The discrepancy slammed into me with the force of a train. It wasn’t just a simple mix-up. The dates, Daniel’s age, and his supposed role in the incident simply did not align. It didn’t make sense. If Daniel was six months old, an infant, at the time of the “critical infant mix-up” twenty years ago, how could he have been a junior intern on duty? He would have been *in* the nursery, not working in it.

This wasn’t a mistake in the records. This was a deliberate fabrication. The Finches had changed Daniel’s birth records. Or, even more chillingly, the Daniel in the photo, the one they claimed was six months old, wasn’t the one who was a junior intern. Or, the Daniel who was an intern wasn’t *this* Daniel.

My head spun with the implications. Daniel’s official birth date, the one on the certificate, would have placed him at around 20 years old at the time of the incident, too young to be an intern. But if he was only *six months old* then, as the photo suggested, then the birth certificate itself was a lie. Or the photo’s caption was a lie. Something was fundamentally wrong with Daniel’s timeline.

I immediately called Leo, my voice breathless with the urgency of my discovery.

“I found something,” I blurted out. “Old photos of Daniel as a baby. Dated twenty years ago, saying he was six months old. But the incident report… if he was an intern, he couldn’t have been a baby in the nursery. His birth certificate date doesn’t fit either scenario. It’s all wrong, Leo. His age, his connection to that incident. Nothing aligns.”

Leo was silent for a long moment. “This is big, Elara,” he finally said, a note of grim satisfaction in his voice. “This isn’t just a cover-up of an incident. This hints at an identity fraud. A swapped identity. And if Daniel wasn’t the Finches’ biological child at all, if they fabricated his birth records… then who was he? And whose baby actually died in that nursery?”

His words hung in the air, cold and stark. The initial misunderstanding that the Finches simply wanted to seize Daniel’s estate felt laughably naive now. This was a secret far deeper, far more personal, tied to Daniel’s very identity, to the fundamental truth of who he was. And it suggested that the Finches had been living a monstrous lie for two decades. The thought twisted my stomach. My husband, Daniel, my love, a living secret. I had to know the truth, no matter the cost.