“Hemphill was the one who suggested you,” Lee said, pausing before he walked away. “Since I knew you were from Oconee County it seemed perfect, so I convinced Hudson you were the best choice.”

I HAD A SHOOT AT THE UNIVERSITY IN THE AFTERNOON, BUT I couldn’t remember if it was at two or two-thirty, so I checked my calendar, a calendar that had no visits to Oconee County marked on it. I hadn’t been back since Christmas and had no plans to return until Aunt Margaret’s birthday in July, but the office party I’d attended two weeks earlier now made me reconsider. Allen and I were the only singles, so it wasn’t surprising we ended up in a corner together, leaning against a wall and sipping cheap white wine from styrofoam coffee cups. We had talked about our backgrounds, which were in many ways similar—both of us growing up in the rural South, both of us the first in our families to go to college. Yet I did most of the talking. It was clear that this was a man who’d spent much of his life letting people reveal themselves to him, not vice versa.

And I was a woman who spent much of her life focusing on surfaces to reveal deeper meanings. Allen wore a wedding band, although I’d overheard Hudson’s secretary say SINGLE had been checked on his insurance application. I’d glanced at that wedding ring several times, wondering if it symbolized some lingering attachment to an ex-wife. Or was it merely a prop to keep women such as myself at bay, let us know he wasn’t interested?

But he was interested, at least had seemed so at the time. As the days passed and I hadn’t heard from him I’d begun to second-guess my instincts. Now, however, Lee had confirmed them.

“Good girl,” Lee said when I stopped by his office on my way out to lunch. “I wouldn’t send you up there if I didn’t know you’d do a great job.”

“When do we leave?”

“Two o’clock tomorrow. That gives you plenty of time to make the meeting the Forest Service has set up.”

“Tomorrow afternoon I’m supposed to photograph a Confederate flag rally.”

“We getting ready to secede again?” Lee quipped. “I’d better go home and dust off my uniform.”

“Why bother, Lee? You’d just lose again.”

“You think so?”

I tried to imagine Lee on a battlefield in Virginia, shoeless and surviving on ditch water and hardtack. But I knew he’d have dropped dead of a heart attack before he marched across Bull Street, much less across the Georgia and Virginia state lines.

“So what about the rally?” I asked.