Now here’s where I have to tell on myself a little. My first thought wasn’t a kind one. My first thought was, well, this isn’t mine to deal with, and I tucked it back in the book and went to bed.

But I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about that baby, who’d be a grown woman by now, somewhere out there with no idea her daddy left her these words. And I kept thinking about Harold, and how I never got a letter like that. He just left in the middle of buttering his toast. So the next morning I called my granddaughter Casey and I said, honey, help your old grandma put something on the Facebook.

I’ll be straight with you, I figured maybe a few folks would see it. Casey took pictures of the letter and posted it and asked people to share. By that afternoon it had a few hundred. By the next morning it was past a hundred thousand. Within a week that thing had been shared two point three million times. Two point three million. I didn’t even know that many people knew how to work a computer. My phone was buzzing day and night and I half wished I’d never done it, because part of me felt like I’d gone and put a dying man’s private heart up on a billboard.

Then on a Thursday, my phone rang from a number I didn’t know, and I almost let it go to the machine. I’m glad I didn’t.

It was a young woman, and she was crying so hard I could barely make her out. She said her name was Emily Turner, she was twenty-two years old, and she’d been tagged in the letter about four hundred times. “That’s my dad,” she kept saying. “That’s my dad.

His name was Daniel.” She told me he died three days before she was born. Three days. Her mama went into labor at the funeral home, bless her heart. And Emily said the thing that broke me clean in half. She said, “I have never once seen his handwriting. I didn’t even know what it looked like until your post.”

I had to sit down on the kitchen floor. Twenty-two years old and the first time she ever saw her own father’s hand was on my Facebook page, next to a stranger’s name. I told her I was so sorry, and she said no, no, don’t you dare be sorry, you don’t understand what you’ve given me.

Then she got quiet for a second. And she said, “I went to my grandpa’s shed.”