Sadie drew her knees up to her chest and tilted her head. “I have the most perfectly perfect idea. Why don’t you get out of here for a while? Go to your family’s beach house in St. Simons. Just take her journal and go. Read and rest.”

“That’s not what I need.”

“What do you need?”

“To find a man … .”

Sadie lifted her eyebrows and laughed. “You need a man?”

“Not for me.” I smiled because that is what Sadie can make me do even when I’m not in the mood to do so. “Okay, here it is: When she was twenty years old, Mother fell in love with someone. A someone who lived in Alabama. A someone who changed his mind about loving her. A man who was also friends with your mother. For two years, Mother spent her summers at your family Summer House.”

“Isn’t it funny how we still call it the Summer House and Mom lives there all the time now?” Sadie shook her head and her ponytail fell out; she slipped the rubber band around her wrist and looked at me. “I have no idea about a man, but I do know your mother didn’t like to visit there. She used to talk all of us into coming to St. Simons.”

“I guess I never thought much about it. I just knew that we always had a beach house in Georgia and that is where we went—there was no discussion about it. But then again, there wasn’t much discussion with Mother about much of anything once she’d made up her mind.”

“Exactly,” Sadie said.

“But there was more to it than her just being stubborn about St. Simons. There is, or at least there was, someone there in Alabama she was avoiding.”

“Well, I guess my mom would know, but she never said anything to me.”

I let out a long sigh. “I want to find out.”

“Why?” Sadie placed her hand on my knee. “Why does it matter now?”

“I don’t understand why she kept these summers such a secret. It’s like she omitted two entire summers of her life.”

“Yeah, for a woman who was intent on ‘telling the truth,’ she sure had her own secrets. Shit, remember that time we were grounded for two months for lying about Parson’s party? She went ballistic about lies … she said, and I quote, ‘Always speak the truth.’”

“Well, this is a truth she never spoke. And whoever this man was, he changed her life course. She—I think—also left a letter for him. And …” I paused. “For the Atlanta history exhibit they want to know more about that summer of ’61 because that is when she supposedly helped with the movement. She never told me about it and she never told Dad and … somehow the history center knows something I don’t. That is really weird.”