“I was with my cousin.” He paused. “Anyway. He wanted … no, he needed some Jack Daniel’s. I was fourteen, but I drove. We all did. We were in the country. Mama hardly left the trailer and Daddy was never home … so we all learned to drive young. Edwin had me take him to the liquor store, and I did. I waited in the car, not knowing that he wasn’t buying liquor but actually demanding it at gunpoint.”

He was quiet for a long while, and I waited, wanting to go back in time—only five minutes. To the five minutes ago when I didn’t know this about him. When this darkness hadn’t entered my awareness. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Even when he ran into the car, I didn’t know. Even when I saw the gun, I didn’t realize what he’d done. It wasn’t until the liquor store owner came running out and Edwin shot at him …” Hutch looked away.

“My God, did he hit him?”

“Yes, he hit him. But I didn’t know that. I swear I wouldn’t have driven away if I’d known. Edwin was screaming at me to drive. To drive. To step on it. And I did.”

“So … then what happened?”

“All the horrible things you imagine. That man died. Edwin is still in jail and I went to juvenile. Your mother was wrong, though—I wasn’t there for a month. I was there for a year. And I don’t know who’d I’d be or where I’d be if it weren’t for Mr. Bartow.”

“Who is he?”

“He is the farmer I worked for. He is the man who believed in me. He is the man who hired a lawyer and finally got me acquitted and the records sealed. He is the man who paid for Auburn … .”

“Why did he do all that for you?”

“He believed in me. I’d worked his farm since I was twelve, but every evening we sat in his library and talked about books and history … he’d give me books to read and then we’d discuss them. He … lost his son and he sort of adopted me.”

“That’s who you stay with when you go home, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“When were you ever going to tell me any of this?”

“I was going to tell you. I was.”

“When?”

He exhaled. “I don’t know. But not here and not like this. I wanted to be able to take you home; let you meet Mr. Bartow and … not like this, where it looks like I’m hiding something from the person I love the most.”

“You were hiding this from me,” I said.

He shook his head. “Not hiding. Waiting.”