GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A woman has moved her family back to Grand Rapids after finding out something unexpected.

“This is it. This is the spark I was looking for. This is something I was looking for. Whatever it is that was missing, it’s now there,” Javagda Pierre said.

Pierre knows all about the neighborhood around Madison Ave. near Gerald R. Ford Academic Center. It’s where she lived until she moved away when she was 17. She’s 43 now.

“I know who lives on this corner, that corner, these streets. I’ve been in these houses. I’ve been up and down the block,” she said.

Somehow, she never paid attention to the house at 827 Madison Avenue or Bruce Davis.

“I was around the corner from him. I’ve walked by his house. I got my hair done by his neighbor,” Pierre said.

Davis spent many days on the front stoop speaking to everyone who passed by but he and Pierre never met. He did know Pierre’s mom.

“We would just hang out and have fun, greet people as they walked down the street. One day her mom was walking down the street. I go ‘Hey, how are you doing.’ She would come by every day and I would speak to her. That’s how she and I met,” Davis recalled. “We got to become friends.”

That was in 1979. Davis had just graduated high school.

By 1996, he was married with two kids. Pierre was just a teen struggling with her identity. So, she moved to Florida.

“It was something that was missing. I was trying to look for me who am I. Why do I do this? Why do I do that? Why do I smile like this? Why do I talk like that? Why do I have a heart like this? It was just a lot of why’s and nobody had answers,” she said.

Last March, she turned to Ancestry DNA Match to learn part of her truth.

“The point of doing the test was to find out what I was mixed with,” she said.

She found out a lot more than she expected. The man she thought was father actually wasn’t. Instead, it was Bruce Davis.

“I was just blown away,” he said.

Pierre flew to Grand Rapids the following month to meet him. It was more assurance that the results were correct.

“We kept staring at each other like you look like me, “Davis said.

Pierre added, “We have so much in common and the energy is just right.”

The two both agree only one thing brought them together.

“I think it’s the universe. There’s no other explanation besides the universe saying it is time. I’ve been away from him for so long,” Pierre said.

Now, Pierre is embracing a whole journey. Davis is too.

“My heart is happy. I’m happy and it’s like a new start on life,” he said. “I have three sons. I’ve always wanted a daughter of my own. It feels good to have a daughter of my own. It feels really good. It’s the best feeling in the whole wide world to have your own,”

Pierre couldn’t think of a better way to be welcomed back home.

“It’s amazing,” Pierre said.

Pierre wrote a book about her experience called ‘When to cry when you’re Born to be Strong’. You can purchase it on Amazon.