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"Shocked, I guess. Maybe even a little angry. At the same time, I knew she believed she'd done the right thing for me by withholding it. Like maybe she thought she was protecting me somehow. And...I still love her. To me, they were my parents."

Glen brought his lips together and said nothing, but later, on their last night together, Glen returned to the subject. "I've been thinking about what you told me the other night, and I've got to admit that I'm a little worried about you, Tan."

"Because you think I'm making a mistake by heading to Asheboro?"

"No," Glen answered. "Your curiosity about your past makes perfect sense to me. Hell, if someone dropped that sort of bombshell on me, I'd probably do the same thing. But I'm concerned about the way you've been living since you quit your last job. I mean, I can understand taking a little time to travel around and visit friends or whatever, and I get that you had to take care of your grandma when she was sick. But returning to Cameroon? I don't get that part. It strikes me that you're postponing your life instead of actually living it. Or even moving backward. I mean, you've never even owned a home, right? Hasn't life on the move gotten tiring for you yet?"

You sound like my grandma, Tanner thought, but he kept that to himself.

Instead, he shrugged. "I liked it there."

"I understand that." Glen sighed. "Just know that if you ever decide to settle down, you have a job waiting for you with my company. You can live wherever, set your own schedule, and have a chance to work with some of the Delta guys again. Molly even has a sister who's single." He waggled his eyebrows, at which Tanner had to laugh.

"Thanks," he said, taking a swig of beer. 

"And about your search..."

"I thought you just said you understood my curiosity."

"I do. I was just wondering whether you tried using 23andMe or one of those other DNA sites?"

"I tried all of them, but other than a couple of very distant relatives in Ohio and California—as in many, many times removed—there wasn't anyone. It must have been a small family. But if you have any suggestions that might cut the legwork, I'm open to ideas."

"I don't," he said, "and your plan is definitely old-school, but who knows? It's the way people used to search, right? You just might get lucky."

Tanner nodded, but wondered again what the odds were of locating someone from more than forty years ago, especially when the first and last names were so common as to be almost meaningless. In the United States alone, there were almost two million people with the same last name—he'd googled it—and more than a hundred of them lived in Asheboro.

Assuming, of course, his grandmother's memory could even be trusted by that point. In her shaky, almost illegible scrawl, all she'd managed was

III

From Pine Knoll Shores, the drive to Asheboro took four hours, and after pulling into town, Tanner swung by a Walmart for a map, notebook, and pens before finding his way to the library. With help from a nice lady at the checkout counter, he learned that while the library didn't have phone books dating back to the 1970s or 1980s, she'd been able to scrounge up one from 1992. It would have to do.

Next step, finding his father, a man he'd never met.

At one of the library tables, he unfolded the map and divided the town into four quadrants. Then, using the old phone book, he jotted down the name and address of everyone named Johnson and roughly pinpointed their locations on the map; using his iPhone, he cross-referenced the Johnsons in the recent online white pages with the older ones from the phone book, circling on the map those that matched. He figured that if he was going to start knocking on doors, he might as well try to do it as efficiently as possible.

He hadn't been able to finish before the library closed, which meant he'd have to return on Monday. He considered visiting the county offices as well; property records might aid in his search, but that, too, would have to wait until after the weekend.

After dropping his things at a Hampton Inn and feeling the need to stretch his legs, he explored the downtown area. He strolled past an antiques store, a florist, and a handful of boutiques occupying the ground floors of buildings constructed early in the previous century. There was a lovely park in the center of town and, despite the thickening clouds in the sky, the sidewalks bustled with people walking their dogs and pushing baby strollers. The scene struck him as a throwback to another era and Tanner tried to picture what it must have been like to grow up here. Had his father somehow met his mother here? he wondered. As far as he knew, his grandparents had never lived here, so how would his mom and dad have crossed paths? More questions his grandma would never be able to answer, he knew, wishing he'd had just a bit more time with her.