Brad Yule

And he's like, oh, yeah, sure.

Why?

Well, nothing important.

I went through all the reasons why you might need to talk to your parents at that age.

Everything was fine.

And the more I deflected, the more he'd come back to, I want to meet you for lunch.

I just want to know what we're going to talk about.

So I finally gave up and realized that I'm going to ask my 79-year-old dad over the phone if I'm adopted.

And I said, Dad, this lady's reached out to us saying that her sister had a boy and it's me and the child adopted me and didn't tell me.

Is that true?

And there was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone.

I could hear his fingers drumming on what later I learned was his dashboard.

He had run an errand that day and that's why he answered his cell phone.

And after a long pause, I got, yeah, Bradley, you're adopted and we've been trying to figure out how to tell you.

If that initial 48-year-old secret wasn't a big enough shock, it came with two more.

My birth mother had died 19 years before I ever found out I was adopted.

I was never going to close that part of my story up.

The flip side of that was my biological father was very much alive, but he had been in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana for the last 50 years for murder.

That sent me on a mad research dash to find out everything I could about this man, why he was in prison, who he was, anything I could learn about him.

Back in Louisiana in the 70s, they didn't keep a whole lot of court records.