CASSIDY NURSE: IT'S TIME FOR MY STORY

Zephany Nurse was famously abducted as a baby. Now her sister tells how she always felt she was living in the shadow of her missing sibling.

- KIM ABRAHAMS

IT’S not hard to see how this teenager triggered the end of the Zephany Nurse mystery.

Cassidy Nurse is the spitting image of the young Cape Town woman who made headlines worldwide when she was reunited with her biological family in 2015 following a set of extraordinary circumstances – 17 years after being snatched from her mother’s hospital bedside two days after being born.

Long dark hair, hazel eyes, fair skin – for the sisters it’s almost like looking in a mirror.

But neither Cassidy nor Zephany – or Miché Solomon as she was christened by the woman who kidnapped her – has had her happy ending. The sisters are both estranged from their parents and are battling to make their way in the world, their lives forever affected by a complex, painful saga.

Miché (22) is a single mom of two, torn between the family who raised her and the one whose blood she shares. Cassidy is a high school dropout who lived her childhood in the shadow of her lost sister .

The siblings are close but Cassidy (18) has had plenty of ups and downs since Miché’s true identity was discovered. And she’s finally ready to tell her story, she says.

“I always knew the time would come when I’d be able to share my side.

“That’s why I’m here today."

GROWING up she felt like “the replacement child” – the daughter her parents had as a substitute for their missing firstborn.

It made her question Morné and Celeste Nurse’s love for her,

Cassidy says. “I feel the love they gave me wasn’t actually meant for me. That love was supposed to be for my sister.”

Cassidy’s mother first told her about her stolen sister when she was three years old and after that her parents spoke about Zephany almost every day, she says.