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four-poster bed in the dark and listened to the echoes of their yelling. Far on the other end of the house, I couldn’t hear their words and I didn’t want to. When Ace left, he slammed the front door so hard that I felt its vibration in my room. Silence followed and then was broken by the sound of my mother sobbing. Eventually I heard my father’s footsteps on the stairs. Ace never crossed that threshold again, and that’s the night I realized that every ending is not a happy one.
    Somewhere along the line I just blocked out what Ace had said. Or made myself believe that it was just his anger, his addiction, or maybe both that had led him to say, “You are not my father.” When I asked my dad about it later, he’d said, “Ace just meant that he
wished
I wasn’t his father. But I am and there’s no changing that, no matter what passes between us.”
    “Well, I’m glad you’re
my
father, Daddy,” I said, as much to make myself feel better as to comfort him.
    As I sat in my apartment with those papers in my hand, I heard Ace’s words again, and this time I could not silence them. They were like a key that unlocked a box containing myriad other questions that had hovered in the periphery of my consciousness over the years, but to which I had never actually entertained answers. They were little things that might have been easily explained…unless they
couldn’t
be. Things like: Why were there no pictures of my mother pregnant? Why were there no photographs of me before the age of two? Why did I resemble no one in my family even a little? These little questions now tapped on my consciousness like moths at a light.
    I started to feel a little panicky, a little dramatic. Then I remembered my conversation with Zack.
And all those pictures of you…forget it. You’re going to have psychos crawling out of the woodwork.
    He was right, of course. This
was
New York City; the crazies don’t need much of an excuse to get busy. I held the Polaroid in my hand; maybe the woman didn’t look that much like me, after all.
    I did what I always do in times of crisis, small or large. I picked up the cordless phone to call my father. The receiver was in my hand before I was even conscious of reaching for it, the keypad burning, waiting for me to punch in the numbers. But my finger hovered there above the glowing numbers as I hesitated, hearing blood rushing in my ears. I stared at the phone, not quite able to will my fingers to move. It was silly, wasn’t it? To call over such nonsense. In the distance, over the buzzing of the dial tone, I heard an insistent knocking.
    The sound brought me out of my head and it took a second to realize that there was someone at my apartment door. I came back to the present and walked across the room, looked through the peephole. The man standing in the hallway was a stranger but I opened the door a crack. I know what you’re thinking. What New Yorker is going to open her door to a strange man, particularly in a moment like this, after receiving a letter like that?
    New Yorkers are really no more savvy than anyone else. We’re just more paranoid. And I was too distracted to think about protecting my life. Besides, the guy I saw through the peephole interested me. As in: He was
hot.
I opened the door and looked at him. He was frowning, hands on his hips.
    You feel the chemistry, you know. It’s that little jolt that lets you know the sex would be good, very, very good. You feel it in your lungs and between your legs. It doesn’t really have anything to do with looks, but for the record: dark brown hair, almost black, cropped close to his head, so short it was really little more than stubble, deep brown eyes, candy lips I was already imagining in the little dip between my collarbone and my throat. He felt it, too, I could tell. He looked less angry for a moment.
    “Look,” he said, recovering nicely, “if you have a problem with the noise, how about just knocking on the door and letting me