My mother kept a high school yearbook hidden in a locked drawer.
I found it after she died.
Her senior year.
I flipped through the pages slowly, expecting nothing more than old photographs and names I didn’t recognize.
Then I reached the back.
A boy had written:
“To Margaret. I will find you again. I promise.
Love, James.”
I didn’t know any James.
My father’s name was Robert.
I searched the yearbook.
James Fuller.
Class president.
Next to his photograph were the words:
“Most Likely to Succeed.”
I Googled him.
A retired judge in Savannah.
Seventy-one years old.
I stared at his phone number for nearly an hour before finally calling.
He picked up.
“Hello?”
I almost hung up.
Then I said, “Is this James Fuller?”
Silence.
Eight seconds of it.
Then he said quietly,
“Margaret’s daughter.”
My stomach tightened.
I said, “How do you know who I am?”
Another silence.
Then he said,
“Six hundred dollars a month.”
I frowned.
“What?”
“Six hundred dollars a month. For thirty-eight years. To a PO box in your mother’s name.”
I couldn’t speak.
“I never missed a payment,” he continued.
“Why?”
His voice cracked.
“Because you’re my…”
He stopped.
I whispered, “My what?”
“Because you’re my daughter.”
The room seemed to tilt.
I sat down on the floor.
“My father is Robert.”
“I know.”
“Then how can you be my father?”
“Biologically,” he said. “I am.”
I demanded a DNA test.
He agreed immediately.
Two weeks later, the results arrived.
I opened the envelope with shaking hands.
99.99%.
James Fuller was my biological father.
I couldn’t breathe.
For thirty-eight years, my mother had let me believe Robert was my father.
And James had been sending money every month.
But why?
I asked him to tell me everything.
He agreed to meet me.
We met at a quiet restaurant outside Savannah.
When I walked in, he stood immediately.
He looked older than the photograph in the yearbook, of course.
But his eyes were exactly the same.
The same eyes I had seen in my own mirror my entire life.
He reached for my hand.
I didn’t take it.
“Why did you leave my mother?”
He looked down.
“I didn’t.”
That answer stopped me.
He told me they had been seventeen and eighteen when Margaret became pregnant.
They were in love.
They planned to marry.
But Margaret’s parents found out.
They threatened to send her away and told James he would never be allowed near her again.
James tried to fight them.
He even went to Margaret’s house one night.
Her father met him on the porch with a shotgun.
“He told me Margaret had miscarried,” James said.
“I believed him.”
My mother hadn’t miscarried.
She had given birth to me.
Three months later, her parents arranged her marriage to Robert.
James said he searched for her.
For years.
But Margaret had moved.
He eventually found an old forwarding address.
Then another.
By the time he located her, she was married with a baby.
Me.
“I saw you once,” he whispered.
“What?”
