Welcome to Strangers from KCW and Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tau.

And three years ago, we produced a story about Matt James and Tyler, which we reposted last week.

And at the end of that episode, Tyler issued a dare for Matt James

to come to Yellow Springs, the town where she grew up, the town he fled when she was an infant,

because he was 18 years old, and he was her father. If you've never heard the original story,

I think you should go listen to it now. But to catch you up real quick, Matt James and his high school sweetheart, Seleney, got pregnant by accident. They just graduated. They were already broken up. And they had one of those post-breakup one-night stands and she got pregnant. Selene decided to keep the baby and stay in Yellow Springs.

Matt James decided to take off and run.

They met up once before he left at the edge of town

when baby Tyler was just three months old,

and he held her briefly, and then he skipped town and had no contact with Selene or their baby for 16 years

until teenage Tyler called him up one day and said,

Hi, I'm Tyler. I'm your daughter.

Tyler has come to L.A. multiple times to visit Matt James, and they've developed a close

relationship over the last 10 years since she first contacted him. But Matt James has never once,

in the 26 years since Tyler was born, been back to Yellow Springs, Ohio,

the town where he himself went to high school and fell in love for the first time, and fathered a baby, and fled.

For 10 years, Tyler's been hoping he'd make the visit, and three years ago she issued a direct

dare on our show, but only last month did he finally, finally, go.

Tyler was about to move away from Ohio with her boyfriend John, so it was the last chance

for Matt James to go visit her there, to see the house

where she and John were living, see her art and the old furniture she restores, and to revisit

...