Sunday morning when Hutch came to pick me up for the book festival, he stood backlit with the rising sun behind him in the guesthouse door frame. He smiled and I saw the man—the forty-something-year-old man—and I understood exactly who Hutch O’Brien was for me: the love I let go for safety.

The emotions I felt with Hutch might not have been about what could happen then, but for what I’d let go for something misnamed. Like Mother believing that what she’d done with Dad was revenge; it had been something else entirely or something else in addition—it was the beginning of a life. My life.

What Mother had called revenge was really the beginning of my life.

What I had called love was really safety.

It was all in the naming, in the believing that one thing was something it was not.

When Hutch reached my side, I had trouble finding words. When you abruptly realize something you should have known all along, you are a bit off balance, as though someone jumped off the other side of the seesaw and you rise too fast, staring down at the ground, confused.

“Hey,” he said. “You ready?”

“Yep.” I grabbed my purse and walked toward him. Skin has a magnetic quality; I know this because I couldn’t have stopped my body from walking toward him, hugging him. He held me for a minute and then stepped back. Sadness filled the small space between us, like dust falling into the cracks of floorboards. I wanted to diffuse this, scatter the sorrow, but I didn’t know how.

The restaurant jutted over Mobile Bay like a tongue sticking out of a pretty face. Hutch and I sat around a table facing the water. We’d driven the half hour into Mobile and parked walking distance from the book festival, which was in full gear, crowding the streets. We ate and sipped our iced teas in silence, staring out over the water.

Hutch threw a piece of bread to a seagull that caught it in midair.

“I met Micah yesterday,” I said.

“Who?”

“Well, Uncle Cotton told me that Mother was friends with him that summer, and so I dropped by to say hello.”

Hutch laughed. “Just say hello?”

I told Hutch the entire story as we finished off our lunch and then wandered toward the tents. “I would have liked to go with you,” he said, picking up a newspaper that in block letters announced what authors were speaking at which tent on what subject.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“I’ll remember that.” We bent over the schedule and then decided to go hear Cotton speak. We were late; our conversation at lunch had made time run away as easily as a river.

We slipped into the tent where Uncle Cotton was in the middle of the question-and-answer session.