We walked to our separate cars and hugged good-bye. “Thanks for helping me. I’m sure I would have found some of this, but you make it more meaningful.”

I nodded. “You’re welcome.”

In the bright sun, he held my hand. “You wildflower.” He laughed and kissed my cheek, then left without saying good-bye.

“Bye, you,” I said to the empty sidewalk.

Wildflower.

It was a story I’d told Hutch, and I hadn’t thought he remembered. But he had.

Mother’s garden was a flurry of color and wild splendor. As a child, I’d thought it was the purest expression of beauty. Even I understood Mother’s love for flowers, for their beauty, for their fragrance and extravagant fragility.

I also understood her frustration with their unpredictability and wildness—a flower’s ability to become what she didn’t expect or intend. When she planted a pink Lady Banksia and a red bloom emerged, she blamed the soil or the grower or the humidity.

Limestone rocks, flat and raw-edged, lined the paths between the flower beds. Moss grew in between the stepping-stones: sphagnum—even moss has a “real” name. Mother believed all living things had an ordinary name and then a cultured name.

Ellie, she’d once told me. Yes, we call you Ellie, but your name is Lillian. Never forget that. We might call you by your ordinary name, but your real name is innocence and beauty. And this—no matter what you are called—this is who you are—Lillian.

There was one day—a day of very young and unspecified age in my memory—when the weather was frigid and clear. I’d walked with Mother as she gently placed blankets and fleece over the rosebushes to protect them from the frost that would come that night. She mumbled their botanical names while covering the bushes, as if she were tucking precious children into bed, murmuring bedtime prayers. I was jealous in the way a child can be when the world isn’t centered.

I shivered as I followed Mother. She didn’t notice me or my coldness, only the flowers. Oh, how she adored them and called them by their full and real names. I ran off—I don’t remember where I thought I was going, but I know what I sought: warmth, compassion, and someone who spoke my name “that” way.

I’d ended up at Sadie’s house with her mom, Birdie, bundling me in blankets. “Child, what is wrong with you?”

“I want to be beautiful like those flowers. Not ordinary.” What I’d really meant was that I wanted Mother to treat me the way she treated those flowers.

“Nothing living is ordinary,” Birdie said while rubbing my back. “There is no ordinary beauty.”

I nodded at her. “Oh, yes, there is.” I wiggled closer to Birdie’s warm body. “I am.”

“No, precious child, you are no ordinary beauty. You are extraordinary.”