Some other number of men discover they are not biological fathers, but choose to soldier on rather than go to court, unwilling to upset their children or the relationships they have established. Tanner Pruitt, who owns a small manufacturing business in Texas, paid child support for seven years after divorcing his wife. His daughter never looked like him, but it wasn’t until she was 12 that it began to bother him. He told the girl he wanted to check something in her mouth, quickly swabbed some cheek cells and sent the samples off to a lab. After the DNA test showed they weren’t related, he contacted a lawyer, figuring the lab results would release him from child-support payments and justify reimbursement from the biological father. But the lawyer told Pruitt his only option was to take the matter to court and that doing so might mean giving up his right to see the girl at all. It might also alert her to the truth. Pruitt didn’t want to chance either possibility, so he stayed silent and kept paying.

Image Tanner Pruitt holding a plaster handprint of his daughter. After divorcing the girl’s mother, he paid child support for years before a DNA test revealed that he was not the biological father. He has subsequently received full custody of the girl. Credit... Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

“I spent thousands and thousands of dollars, and it hasn’t cost that biological father a penny, and yeah, I’m angry, but it would have been more harm to her psychologically than it was worth,” says Pruitt, who eventually fought for, and won, full custody. The girl, now 15 years old, recently learned from a relative that Pruitt is not her biological father. Afterward, Pruitt sat with her on a park bench, held her hand and told her the saga. “When it was all over with, she gave me a big hug and told me I’d always be her daddy,” he told me. “Even though she’s not my blood daughter, I was there the day she was born, and I’ve been there ever since, so she’s my daughter, and as long as she’s alive, she’ll always call me Dad.”

Mike’s first inkling that something was amiss in his marriage was in 2000, when he was digging through a closet looking for the source of some mice. He didn’t find any nests, but he did come upon a plastic grocery bag of love letters to his wife, Stephanie, from her co-worker Rob. Confronted, Stephanie confessed to a fleeting affair but assured Mike that L., then nearly 3, was his. A year later, according to Mike’s undisputed court testimony, while changing the sheets, Mike found Rob’s photograph tucked under Stephanie’s side of the mattress. Despite Stephanie’s assurances that L. was his child, Mike’s doubts haunted him. The marriage deteriorated, and as L. approached her 5th birthday, Mike asked Stephanie to take a DNA test with him and their child. They told the girl that all three of them had to take a test for the doctor. Mike remembers telling her that rolling the swab inside her cheek wouldn’t hurt one bit.

“The day the results came back was the most devastating day of my life,” Mike said, beginning to cry as he described opening the envelope from the lab and reading there was no chance he was L.’s father. “This little girl,” he whispered, his throat tight, “is not my child. I ran upstairs, locked myself in the bathroom and cried and dry-heaved for 45 minutes. I felt like my guts were being ripped out.”

Mike and Stephanie separated immediately. Mike expected Rob to pay L.’s support and remembers asking Stephanie if Rob would “step up” to be L.’s father. He recalls Stephanie saying no, although Stephanie, in court documents, denies that such a conversation ever occurred. Mike would later claim that he agreed to support L. only because her rightful father would not.

After Mike moved out, the lawyers he consulted told him there was no use contesting paternity: if he denied he was the father, they said, he wouldn’t get to see L. at all, and the state would probably take his money anyway. So when a clerk at the child-support office handed Mike a form confirming he was the natural father, he signed. Since then, Mike — a human-resources analyst for an equipment manufacturer — says he has paid $7,500 a year in child support, child care, camp and medical insurance.

At first, whenever Mike saw Stephanie after the divorce, he felt a stabbing bitterness, but eventually, he grudgingly accepted the situation. In 2005, he began dating Lori, a woman he had met at his church and whom he would later marry. Lori deeply resented the chunk of Mike’s salary that went to another man’s child, while she was reduced to clipping coupons. But she accepted L. They made scrapbooks together, baked scones and pizza and picked berries at a local farm. Neither Mike nor Lori had any idea Rob was in L.’s life until 2006, when Stephanie called and said she was marrying him. It was then that Mike became consumed with resentment. “The courts insist on the best interest of the child,” Mike fumes, “but it was in the child’s best interest for Stephanie and Rob not to do this in the first place. So why is that burden all of a sudden put on me?”