By the time of my birth their contact had gone from rare to nonexistent. He was listed on the birth certificate, but didn’t meet me until I was six weeks old, when he came down with his parents for what was by all accounts a massively awkward visit.

My mom said my father’s dad couldn’t even make eye contact as she held me, instead just always looking off to her left, as if trying to see around us. To him, more than anything, we represented a wrong turn, one that if acknowledged would make their entire family that much more lost. As for my father, he was nervous and distant, so different from the boy she’d met the year before. Funny how it was only when he was finally right there in front of her, she said, that she knew for sure he was already gone. After that visit, she wouldn’t see him again for ten years.

The only good thing that came out of the whole thing, my mom always said, was a discussion about child support. She, like her parents, hated the thought of any kind of handout, but she was in high school, and diapers and childcare weren’t cheap, so an amount was set, a schedule made. My father might not have been reliable, but the money—in the form of a check, signed by my father’s father’s secretary—always was. After graduating, my mother went to work full-time at Colby Realty, dropping me every morning with my great-aunt Sylvie, who rocked and fed me while she watched her soaps. Later, she would say these were the hardest years of her life.

So that was my father. As for my dad, he came into the picture when I was two years old. A widower with two small girls of his own, he was set up with my mom by mutual friends for a blind date. Both were young and single with small children: it seemed the perfect match. Instead, she hated his humor and the way he ate, while he thought she was stuck-up and didn’t smile enough. Six months later, though, my mom’s car broke down on the single two-lane road that ran through Colby. My dad was the first one who stopped.

They’d been together ever since. He always said she just needed to see him with tools to fall hard. She maintained he was not all wrong.

And so, just like that, we were a family. I was two years old, Amber four, Margo six. I had no real memory of a life without them as my sisters, just as they didn’t recall much that happened before my mom became theirs as well. After the wedding, we’d moved into the same house our dad had been adding onto and tearing apart ever since. Even without the constant construction, it was chaotic and loud, not peaceful by a long shot. But it was what I knew.

So while my dad was present for most of my childhood, my father was more like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. There had been sightings, other people claimed he was real, but the proof was all secondhand: old pictures, ancient conversations, the checks that my mom had put a stop to when my dad adopted me. Then, though, Mr. Champion wrote those three words on the board, and I was determined to fill in my own blanks.

“I want to write to him,” I told her, that first day I came home with the assignment. “Ask some questions.”

“Oh, honey,” my mom had said, getting that heavy, tired look that always came over her face on the rare times this subject came up. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“He’s my father,” I said. “It’s my story. I need to know it.”

I remember she glanced at my dad for support. He was quiet for a moment—he never spoke without thinking first—then said, “Emaline, he might not write you back. You need to be ready for that.”

“I will be,” I said. My mom gave me a doubtful look. “I will. You have to let me at least try.”

In the end, she did, sitting silently across from me as I wrote first a draft—always the perfectionist when it came to school—then a final copy of the letter. I slid it into an envelope, then watched as she flipped through her address book until she found the one that had been on the top right corner of all those checks. She read it aloud, I wrote it down, and we took it to the mailbox together.

It could have ended like that. Nobody, including me, would have been that surprised. But two weeks later, an envelope arrived with my name on it. Inside was a typed letter on thick paper. JOEL PENDLETON, it said at the top. No more Loch Ness. He was real.

Dear Emaline,

Thank you so much for writing me. I have thought of you so often, wondering how you were doing and what you were like, but never thought it was my right or place to try to find out. I would love to answer the questions for your project and, if you were so inclined, tell you a bit about myself as well. I know I can never expect to be your father. But it is my hope that maybe, someday, we might be friends.

The letter went on. He gave me everything I needed of his family history—answering each of my questions in order and detail—before moving onto his own. He was working as a freelance journalist and married, he said, five years now, to a wonderful woman named Leah. They had a two-year-old boy: Benji. Maybe, someday, I could meet him. On the last page, just before his scribbled signature, was an e-mail address. He didn’t say to write him, or that he was waiting to hear from me. It was just there, like an offering.

That was the first time I saw my mom get that particular mix of worry and sadness on her face. Now, I could spot it from across a room. He’d hurt her so much all those years ago. Her greatest fear was that she’d let him get in a place where he’d be able to do the same to me.

I finished my project and handed it in, receiving an A. Then I filed it away. (I was a kid with files, even back then; once a school-supply nerd, always a school-supply nerd.) The letter I kept in the drawer of my bedside table, where I’d take it out and look at it every once in a while. The stationery was so thick, his monogram raised. Like even paper was different, somehow, in his world. Finally, a few weeks later, I opened up my e-mail, typed in the address he’d provided, and wrote to him, thanking him for his help and telling him I’d gotten a good grade. Within a few hours, there was a response.