Lavinia had no interest in finding out who her dad was, but Michelle was determined to get answers. Combing through her twin’s results, Michelle found Arthur, Lavinia’s biological father. The twins drove to meet him at his home in West London.<\/p>\n
“He was a little bit nervous, but he’s got an exuberant character – like me,” says Lavinia. At the end of their meeting, she kissed Arthur on the cheek. <\/p>\n
“I just felt compelled, drawn to do it.”<\/p>\n
Lavinia and Arthur have been close ever since, seeing each other several times a month, often alongside Michelle. <\/p>\n
“I feel like I’ve found a place to belong, and that place is with my dad,” Lavinia says. He has told Michelle that she, too, can call him Dad.<\/p>\n
At a later meeting, the twins asked Arthur what he knew about how they came to be conceived. <\/p>\n
“He said, ‘Your mother knocked on my door. She was very upset. She was crying’,” Michelle says. “She went to him because she wasn’t safe, and she was in shock.” <\/p>\n
Michelle and Lavinia’s mother is not here to tell us exactly what happened, but Arthur says she turned to him in a time of need.<\/p>\n
Michelle was also able to meet her own biological father, Alex, through other newly discovered family members. <\/p>\n
“He was clearly under the influence of drugs,” Michelle says. <\/p>\n
The resemblance between them was undeniable. <\/p>\n
“He’s mine, I’m his, but I didn’t feel like he’s someone I need to take forward in my future with me,” she says.<\/p>\n
“I just needed to know.”<\/p>\n
The twins will never know whether their mother suspected they had different fathers. <\/p>\n
“It must have driven her crazy,” says Lavinia. “She must have seen something, felt something.”<\/p>\n
“I think in the back of Mummy’s head, she knew, but she was in great denial,” Michelle says.<\/p>\n
As non-identical twins, Lavinia and Michelle have always been aware of their differences. The truths revealed in their DNA made those differences seem even more stark, at first. But they will always share a unique bond.<\/p>\n
“We’re miracles,” Lavinia says. “We’re always going to have a closeness that can’t be broken.”<\/p>\n
“She’s my twin sister,” Michelle nods. “Nothing takes away from that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lavinia had no interest in finding out who her dad was, but Michelle was determined to get answers.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-562013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}