It was close. It was carefully, intelligently close, similar enough that a panicked father in a delivery room would have accepted it without question, that an exhausted mother waking from days of unconsciousness might not have had the steadiness yet to examine it.
But Madam Vale had examined it. Quietly. Thoroughly. With the composed, methodical attention of a woman who had sat with the suspicion for the last several hours and had now confirmed it as something beyond suspicion.
This was not the baby she and Julian had seen at the nursery glass.
She was certain. She had been certain from the moment she properly looked, from the moment the warmth of the reunion had settled enough for her to actually see rather than simply receive.
The eyes were different. Not wrong, not obviously wrong, but different in the way that only a person who knew precisely what they were looking for would catch. The shade. The depth of it.
