His name was Marcus. That’s what the letter said. His son, whose name is Daniel, explained that Marcus had grown up in the same small town in Ohio where I grew up. He was a year behind me in school.

I don’t remember him, and I hate admitting that, but I don’t. Daniel said his father had carried what he described as a “quiet feeling” for me since we were teenagers, which is such a strange and specific way to put it. He said his father was not a dramatic person. He said his father had married a woman named Ruth in 1989 and had two kids and by every account had a full and good life. He was not, Daniel wanted me to understand, a sad man or a lonely man. He just had this one thing he did every year.

Daniel wrote that his father never expected anything from it. He never wanted to disrupt my life. He just wanted, once a year, to acknowledge that I existed somewhere in the world. That’s how Daniel put it. “He just wanted to acknowledge that you existed.”

Marcus passed in March. Prostate cancer. He was 63.

I sat on my kitchen floor for a while after I finished reading it. Not dramatically. I just sort of slid down the cabinet and sat there with the card in my lap. The refrigerator was making that humming sound it makes. I remember that specifically for some reason. I was thinking about Dennis holding up envelopes and doing that fake game show voice. I was thinking about how I never once guessed a Marcus from my hometown. I was thinking about a boy one year behind me in school who I apparently walked past in hallways for years without it leaving any mark on me at all, and how that somehow felt worse than anything else about this.

I was also thinking, weirdly, about Ruth. His wife. Whether she knew. Whether she was the one who helped him address the envelopes all those years. Whether it was a secret he kept from her or a small harmless thing she knew about and maybe even understood. I don’t know why I got stuck on Ruth but I did.

Daniel left a phone number at the bottom of the card. He said he didn’t expect me to call but that his father had wanted me to have it, in case I ever wanted to ask anything. He also said, and I keep coming back to this part, that his father said the one thing he regretted was not signing his full name sooner. He said Marcus told him: “She spent all that time wondering, and she didn’t have to.”