A Premise Straight Out of Fiction — Except It Wasn't

There is a familiar shape to this kind of story: a woman raises a child who is not hers, and lies about it for years. It's the premise behind a well-known Japanese novel, The Eighth Day of the Cicada — a mother steals a baby, builds a life around the secret, and one day the truth catches up. In Florida in 1998, something very close to that premise happened for real. And when the truth finally reached the young woman at the center of it, she did something almost no one expected.