“You don’t know me. My father wrote to you every Christmas for thirty-one years, and before he passed in March, he made me promise two things. Mail this card. And finally tell you who he was, because he said you deserved to know before too much more time went by.”

I read that paragraph standing at my mailbox in my driveway. In my socks. It was cold, I know that, because I remember thinking I should go inside and I just didn’t move. The card was in one of those standard white envelopes and the postmark said Georgia this time. I don’t know why I noticed that. I always notice the postmarks.

Okay. Let me back up a little.

I should explain what thirty-one years of Christmas cards from a stranger actually feels like, because I don’t think it’s what you’re picturing. It wasn’t creepy, or not really. The first one came in 1994. I was living in a rental house in Cincinnati with my then-boyfriend, Dennis, who I would eventually marry. The card was a standard drugstore Christmas card, the kind with a snowy pine tree on the front. Inside it just said “Merry Christmas” and then a single letter: M. No last name. No return address. The handwriting was neat but not fancy. Blue ink, always blue ink, which I only started noticing maybe a decade in.

Dennis thought it was somebody I’d dated before him and he was a little weird about it for about a week, then he forgot about it. The next year it came again. Same thing. And the year after that.

By year four or five we made it a kind of yearly game. Dennis would hold the envelope up dramatically before I opened it and say something like, “This is the year M. confesses everything,” and then we’d open it and it would just be the same two words and that same letter and we’d laugh.

It became this small strange tradition inside our marriage. Something that was ours, almost, even though neither of us had any idea who M. was.

I genuinely ran through every M I could think of. Michael from high school who I kissed at a party junior year and never spoke to again. My college friend Marguerite who I had a falling out with in 1993 over something I don’t even fully remember anymore, something about a guy, something petty. My first boss, a man named Martin, who was kind to me when I was 22 and terrible at my job. I cycled through the list regularly. Dennis had his own theories. He was partial to the idea that it was a mistake, that whoever M. was had the wrong address and just kept sending it out of habit or embarrassment. That was very Dennis. He liked the benign explanation.