He wrote and deleted eleven versions. In the end he wrote: Hi. I think we're related. I'm Tyler. I live in Mesa. I'm 16. I just found out some stuff and I don't really know what I'm doing. You don't have to answer.
He pressed send and threw the phone onto the bed as if it had bitten him.
She answered in forty minutes.
OMG HI. I saw you on my list like a month ago!! I asked my dad who you were and he got super weird and said he needed to think about it and then he went in the garage for like two hours. Then he told me. Kind of. I'm 14. I play soccer. Are you okay??
He read it six times. Then he wrote back. And then she wrote back, and they kept going until one in the morning. Sofia typed the way she probably talked, fast and without punctuation, with a lot of exclamation points. She lived on the east side of Tucson with her mom, Ana, who was a nurse, and her dad, and a dog named Frijol who was, she said, possibly the dumbest dog in Arizona. She played midfield. She hated math and loved history. She had always wanted an older brother, she said, and then added, sorry is that weird, that's weird, sorry. He wrote back: It's not weird. It's kind of weird. But not bad weird.
Three days later, an email arrived in Tyler's inbox from an address he did not recognize. The subject line said: From Daniel Reyes (Sofia's dad).
He sat with it unopened for a whole evening. Then he opened it.