He looked up at me now. “Exactly. That we’re broken isn’t new, but we all get to choose what we do with that.”

“You lied.”

“To protect her. To protect my brother. I wanted to free her heart to go to him.”

“Her whole life she tried to talk herself out of loving you.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” he said. “I don’t think you can talk yourself out of or into loving someone.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know.”

“Ellie, I love you and your family, but I never want to talk about this again, okay? I want us to continue to have this beautiful relationship we’ve started this summer … but I never want to talk about this again. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And your dad can never know.”

“I agree.”

“It was a long, long time ago.”

“It never was for her. It was never a long time ago for her—it was always with her.”

“Why was this so important to you? You were relentless in finding out … why?”

“I don’t think I knew why until right this moment.” I took his hand. “I think in my mother I saw that heartbreak can come to define your whole life. It can become who you are instead of something that happened to you. And I don’t want that. I want to figure out how to get past the brokenness or at least live with it in a loving, creative way. And knowing her entire story, knowing the full truth, seemed the only way to figure that out.”

“Sometimes the whole truth is more hurtful than the lie,” he said.

“I know,” I said, and hugged him. “Thank you, Uncle Cotton. Thank you for sharing this with me. I’m sorry, so sorry, if any of this has caused you pain.”

“You are a wonder,” he said, and kissed my cheek.

That was the last time we’d speak of this—my uncle and I. He left to help Dad fix the fence, and I sat alone at that table, thinking of what is common to man—a broken heart. And thinking of what is uncommon—how each soul deals with a broken heart. For Mother—it was shutting down her heart. For Cotton—creativity and a life of writing.

That was where Rusty found me—on the back porch still, my cold coffee at my side, “The New Cinderella” folded on my lap. He looked down at me. “What are you doing?”

“I was talking to Cotton,” I said, fingering the edges of the story.

“No, I mean what are you doing just sitting here now?” His voice was torn and mingy, as if he didn’t want to waste one more syllable.

I pointed to the yard, the magnolia tree to my right. “You remember that bird, Rusty? The cardinal that slammed into the window the day Mother died?”

“Of course,” he said.