I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(15)

“What?” said Zach, blinking with surprise, evidently completely thrown off by my failure to be complicit in his lie.

“I never said that.”

I watched Zach regroup, tossing off shock like a hat and replacing it with a regretful, embarrassed face so authentic looking that it probably would have fooled most people, but it didn’t fool me. He scratched his head, sheepishly. “Uh, right. My bad. Sorry to bring it up.”

Disgusted with him, I turned to Dev. “It? There’s no it. Because I never said that,” I told him. It suddenly seemed crucial to be as clear as possible. “Not because I wouldn’t say it, but because I wouldn’t think it. Ever. How could I? Zach is mistaken.”

Without looking up from the stockpot, Dev nodded. “Okay.”

Zach mumbled, “Hey, sorry,” and backed out of the kitchen, scalding me with a glare and leaving me dreading the conversation I knew we’d have later. But when later came, instead of getting mad, in a not uncharacteristic sharp swerve toward sweetness, near tears, Zach apologized for the lie, for letting his insecurity get the best of him.

Standing in the shadow of those poor, innocent lilies with the memory of that old lie and with this new one snared between the three of us, I hoped against hope that Dev would do what he ended up doing: be complicit in my lie, keep quiet, and walk away. But, as I watched him go, even before I could exhale with relief, I saw myself for who I was: a woman who would yank someone else’s lie into the light and feel noble about it, but who wanted to keep her own—and wanted help keeping her own—safely tucked away in darkness. I turned to Zach.

“I need to tell you something.”

He smiled and touched his nose to mine. “Go for it.”

“I lied.”

Zach pulled back. “About what?”

I’d been gearing up for full disclosure, for telling him how I’d felt sometimes that he wanted not just my present and future, but all of it, to stamp his name—like a kid going to summer camp—on every important belonging I’d ever had, on my past, my private thoughts, my likes and dislikes, on the books I’d read, until they were his instead of mine. I had thought I’d tell him how lying about the flowers had been an act of self-preservation. But looking into his worried amber eyes, I didn’t have the heart.

“Stargazers aren’t my favorite flower.”

Zach burst out with the laugh of a person who had been holding his breath. “Is that all?”

I refused to be let off that hook so easily. “No, it was awful of me to lie. We just happened so fast. And I had all these years of being myself before I knew you, and that life, well, it was just so full of details that had been mine for so long, and, I guess there were just moments when I didn’t want to share all of them with you, which I suppose is fair enough, but I should have just said that to you when you asked the flower thing, but I couldn’t figure out how, and so I said, ‘Stargazers.’ And I’m sorry.”

Zach nodded. “I get it.”

“You do? Really?”

“You wanted to start fresh with me.”

I sighed. “Oh, Zach.”

“Roses or whatever were part of your old life. Stargazers are part of our life. I feel exactly the same.”

“That’s not actually it.”

He lifted my hand and kissed it. “Not to be a jerk, but I think I might see this more clearly than you do.”

“Why would you?”

“Because I’m not blinded— No, blinded is the wrong word.” He thought for a few seconds. “Distracted. I’m not distracted by loyalty to my past, to my family.”

I shook my head in confusion. “What?”

“I like knowing that from here on out, we’ll be each other’s family, something completely new and better than what we had before. But you’re more attached to your past and way closer to your family than I am to mine, so leaving them behind probably feels a little like betrayal to you.”

“Zach, wait. My family won’t stop being my family. I need them.”

He smiled an eager, childlike smile. “Of course they won’t stop! But everything will change! In a really, really good way.”

“Zach—” He cut me off with a kiss.

“Just trust me when I say that we will be okay. Way, way better than okay. I love you so much. You know that, right?”

No simmering. No fluttering fingers or twitch in his cheek. He was so happy and glowing and trusting and true, this man who had taken the whole of himself—past and future, body and soul—and placed it in my hands.

“Sweet Zach,” I said. “Yes. I know you love me. I know. I know. I know.”





Chapter Five

Edith




They gave each other gifts.

From him to her: a newly moribund sand dollar clothed in blue velvet spines; a skate egg case, glossy and horned as a beetle; a glass and red plastic hummingbird feeder; an edition of Audubon’s Birds of America. This last he wrapped with a ribbon and told her to untie it only when she was ready.

One late autumn morning, she sat on the back steps with the book resting on her knees and opened it. The pages offered up heartache, certainly—some of the birds now extinct, their vivid portraits turned to elegy—but the plates of the marsh birds her father had loved didn’t bruise her as Joseph had worried they might. Instead, the precision of the drawings, the service to accuracy over romance—all the weird and sharp-eyed grace of the animals intact, so many of the birds in motion, necks snaking, beaks open or with a fish clapped between them—the sensibility alive inside those pages brought the essence of her father, all that had been lost in those last weeks of his slow dying, back to her.