“In August of 2017 my dad got a letter. I found it in July, when I was looking for my birth certificate for my eligibility paperwork. It’s from a law firm and it’s on behalf of Grady Wolcott.
“I was nine years old. His new wife couldn’t have kids.
“The letter offers my dad forty thousand dollars to consent to a transfer of custody. It says — and this is a quote — that it would provide ‘a level of stability the child’s current circumstances cannot.’
“My dad was making nineteen dollars an hour. He’d sold his own father’s truck three years earlier to pay for my counseling, which he has never told me about and which I know because I found the bill of sale in the same box.
“He never mentioned that letter to me. Not once. Not in nine years. Not when I was fourteen and angry, not when I asked about my father, not ever.
