“Not really,” I said. “I was semi-serious about a guy in Laurens, but he decided I had major character defects.”

“What defects?”

“Self-righteousness. Shutting myself off from others. Emotional frigidity, to use his term. When I’d told him my past had a lot to do with that, he argued I’d have been the same if Ben and I hadn’t been burned, if Momma hadn’t died. He said I liked the way I was. Having someone or something else to blame just made it easier for me not to change.”

“Do you think he was right?”

“I didn’t at the time.”

“That’s a pretty open-ended answer.”

“Let’s leave it open-ended. That way you can decide on your own.”

“What about your relationship with Luke?”

“Luke’s not the marrying kind.”

“But you loved him?”

“Yes. But it was a naïve kind of love. I didn’t realize someone could take your love but not necessarily love you back.”

“I see,” Allen said, and I felt his hand settle on the small of my back. He brought me close and we kissed. We stayed on the bridge a while longer, then drove back to the motel. I went to my room and changed into my pajamas. I got comfortable in the bed, Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders in my hands, but instead of reading I thought about earlier that evening when dark blurred the river with the bank and trees. I remembered how the river was only a sound whispering below us as Allen and I stood on a bridge connecting two states, and how, at least for a while, I did not think of Ruth Kowalsky’s body a mile downstream waiting to be raised, or think of my father dying a little more as he sat in his house alone.

I wondered if I might hear a light knock on my motel room’s door, and if that knock came what I would say, what I would do. But Allen Hemphill did not knock on my door, so I lay the book on the night table and cut off the lamp.

Part Two