“For how long?” I whispered, my fingers digging into the edge of the glass counter.

“The last entry under his name is May of 2003,” Greg said quietly. “He paid cash. Thirty years of service.

He left a mailing address here for the return shipping, just in case he couldn’t pick it up. It’s a rural route up by Higgins Lake.”

I looked down at the address written in the old man’s ledger. My father had been alive. He had been in Michigan, just three hours north of our farm, while we grew up believing he had died or forgotten us. The anger that rose in my throat was hot and thick, but beneath it was something else. A quiet, terrifying hope.

I didn’t go back to the farm that night. I drove straight up north, the headlights of my Buick cutting through the dark pine forests of the lower peninsula. I stayed at a cheap motel near the highway, sleeping in my clothes because my head was spinning too fast to rest.

On Saturday morning, the air was crisp and smelled of damp oak leaves. I followed the gravel roads around the back of the lake, where the cottages got smaller and the woods got thicker.

The address led me to a small, green-painted cabin with a tin roof. A line of wash was flapping in the morning breeze: three flannel shirts and a pair of blue jeans. An old black hound dog was sleeping on the porch, his muzzle gray with age. He didn’t even bark when I pulled into the dirt driveway. He just thumped his tail twice against the floorboards.

I got out of the car, my legs feeling like lead. I walked up the three wooden steps, my eyes fixed on the screen door.

My hand was shaking so hard I could barely knock on the wood frame.

The inner door opened.

An older woman, maybe seventy, stood there. She was wearing a faded denim apron over a sweatshirt, her silver hair pulled back in a practical clip. She had a blue kitchen towel in her hand, and when she looked at my face, she stopped. The towel slipped from her fingers and hit the linoleum floor.

We stood there for what felt like a whole minute, the only sound being the wind through the pines.

“Ruth?” she whispered.

My jaw locked. “How do you know my name?”

“You have his forehead,” she said, her eyes filling with tears that didn’t spill over. “And his chin. He had a picture of you and your sister from the county fair in 1968. It was the only thing he kept on his dresser. I’m Clara. I was his wife. For twenty-four years, up here.”

I felt like the ground was tilting beneath my feet. “He married you?” I asked, my voice flat, empty of anything but shock. “While we were down there?”