The smell of damp cardboard and old paper always gets stuck in the back of my throat, especially when you are clearing out a house that has not seen a fresh coat of paint since the Carter administration. Mama had been gone four days, and the funeral home flowers were already turning brown on the kitchen counter when I finally took a screwdriver to the bottom drawer of her maple secretary desk.

The lock was brass and gave way with a sharp, dry snap that made me jump in the quiet house. I was looking for her burial plot deed and maybe the folder with the car title, but what slid out first was a heavy navy-blue book with faded gold lettering across the spine.

It was her senior yearbook from 1974. East Baton Rouge High. Mama had always been quiet about her younger days, talking mostly about how hard she worked at the textile mill after graduation and how she saved every dime to buy the little brick ranch house on Cypress Street. I sat down right there on the braided rug, my knees popping in the silence, and started turning the heavy, yellowed pages. Her classmates looked like ghosts in their wide collars and feathered hair, smiling frozen smiles under dim gymnasium lights. I found her picture on page forty-two, looking prim and serious with her hair pinned back, her name printed underneath in neat, boring black type. Margaret Vance.

I didn’t think much of it until I got to the very back cover. The heavy paper inside the binding was covered in thick blue ink that had soaked deep into the fibers. To Margaret. I will find you again. I promise. Love, James. I stared at those words for a long time. My father was Robert, a man who smelled like motor oil and cheap pipe tobacco, who yelled at the television during football games and died of a bad ticker when I was twenty-two. I never knew a James. My fingers traced the ink, which looked hurried and heavy-handed, like somebody pressing too hard with a ballpoint pen.

I flipped back through the senior portraits, looking for the name. It took me ten minutes to find him near the front with the class officers. James Fuller. Class president. Captain of the track team. The caption next to his square, clean-cut face said Most Likely to Succeed, and even in black and white you could tell he had that easy, expensive look of someone who owned the town before he even left it.

I don’t even know why I did it, but I pulled my phone out of my pocket and typed his name into the search bar while the grandfather clock in the hallway hummed and ticked.

The internet is a funny thing because it finds people whether they want to be found or not. Within three clicks, I was looking at a directory for a mid-sized law firm down in Savannah, Georgia. Retired partner. Senior municipal judge. A man with silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses who looked nothing like the boy in the 1974 yearbook except for the sharp line of his jaw. There was a direct office line listed under his name. My thumb hovered over the screen for a full minute while the air conditioner kicked on with a loud rattle overhead.

I pressed call before I could talk myself out of it. The phone rang four times, long and hollow, and then a raspy, deep voice answered on the other end.

“Judge Fuller’s office,” he said.

“Hello,” I said, and my own voice sounded small and thin in the empty room. “I am looking for James Fuller.”

“Speaking,” he said.

Then came the silence. Not a normal pause in a conversation, but a heavy, dead sort of quiet that stretched out so long I thought the call had dropped. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. I could hear the faint scratch of paper on his end, like someone moving a file across a wooden desk. I was about to hang up and tell myself it was a prank when he breathed out a long, ragged sigh that sounded like he had been holding it for forty years.

“Margaret’s daughter,” he said.

My stomach gave a hard, sick lurch, and I had to grab the edge of the desk to keep my balance. “How do you know who I am?”

“I’ve known you were out there since the day you were born,” he said, and his voice didn’t shake at all, which somehow made it worse.

I stood up so fast the chair tipped backward and hit the wall with a dull thud. “What are you talking about? Who are you?”

“Six hundred dollars a month,” he said, and the flatness in his tone was terrifying. “Every single month, for thirty-eight years. Sent to a Post Office box in your mother’s name right here in Louisiana. I never missed a single payment. Not when I went to law school. Not when I got married. Not when I took the bench. Because you’re my…”

He stopped. Or maybe I stopped listening. The room seemed to tilt sideways, the yellowed pages of Mama’s yearbook blurring into a gray smear on the floor where the chair had dropped them. Thirty-eight years. Six hundred dollars a month. That was twenty-two thousand eight hundred dollars a year, pumped into a secret drop box while Robert worked two shifts at the metal foundry and Mama shopped with coupons at the Piggly Wiggly. I didn’t know any James Fuller, but my mother had known him well enough to build an entire alternate life on the other side of a money order.

“You’re lying,” I whispered, though I knew by the way my hands were shaking that he wasn’t.

“Check the bottom of that desk,” Judge Fuller said, his voice dropping an octave, losing all the courtroom starch. “There’s a false panel underneath the middle drawer. Look behind it. You’ll find every stub. And you’ll find the letters I sent that she never answered.”

I didn’t answer him. I just stared down at the dark grain of the wood between my feet, the dust motes dancing in the late afternoon sun that cut across the living room floor. I dropped the phone onto the carpet without hanging up, letting the tinny sound of him calling my name drift up from the wool rug, and reached down with trembling fingers to feel for the seam in the wood.