And that is what I mean about becoming and doing something that awful. I can look at that girl who was in that car with Redmond and wonder who she is and why she is there. I, me, Lilly Caulfield Ashford, would never do that. Ever. Who was that in that car? A girl who came alive in the hurt and pain of losing Him to other women and then to Africa: that’s who.

Fifteen

Fifteen

It was the hum of a lawn mower that woke me that next morning after dinner with Hutch. It had been a night of half-sleep as my body tried to find a place to rest after sitting with Hutch and feeling his kindness, as if time had never passed and yet a million years separated our skin from touching. Finally giving up on the elusive reprieve of sleep, I rose early, and Birdie found me on the dock. “Good morning,” I whispered, not wanting to disturb nature or air or morning.

“Ready for breakfast?” she asked.

“Yep,” I said, and then motioned to the bay. “How lucky you are to wake up to this.” This was not a question.

“Very blessed. Now you can see why I left Atlanta, right?”

“Absolutely.”

Together we walked back to her house, through the yard and back gate, and I thought how the mother I knew would never have left her beloved Atlanta. Yet the woman in the journal would have. Mother, once, had trusted in love, and yet I knew the woman who told me Hutch O’Brien was from the wrong kind of family, the wrong kind of boy for me. How could I, she’d once asked, be with a boy from a broken, poor Alabama family when there was so much more for me?

I believe words have a way of working their way into a soul and forming that soul into a shape and vessel it might not have otherwise been. How many times can a mother tell a daughter what is and is not good for her and that daughter not believe it? But where did those words and beliefs come from in the first place—in the beginning?

There was a day when my mother didn’t believe in inappropriate or appropriate love. There was a day—an amazing day and time—when she believed in only this: love. And when she stopped believing in that, she passed that disbelief on to me and into my life.

And maybe she was right—Hutch might not have been “right” for me.

Birdie and I sat at the kitchen table, and she placed a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage in front of me. We sat in silence, watching the chickadees nibbling at the seed in the bird feeder outside her window. I waited.

She smiled at me. “It wasn’t enough, was it?”