I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(20)

“Well, no. I had an apartment, but I gave it up when we got engaged. Anyway, it had stopped feeling like all mine a long time before.”

“Sometimes,” Edith mused, “in order to hold your own, you need a place of your own. Light and space to move around in safely. A place to breathe easy.”

“I used to.” I thought for a moment. “Or maybe what I mean is that I used to not need one because, for the last few years at least, I carried my safe place around with me, like a turtle. But now, I don’t anymore.”

“Oh, Clare. I am so very sorry you don’t anymore.”

I put the cinnamon roll bowl on the bench next to me, took Edith’s hand, and hung on for dear life.

“May I say something else?” she asked, after a long pause.

I nodded, numbly.

“I know the pull of a dark, complicated man, the kind who has trouble loving anyone but you. But let me tell you this: the ones who look like home are home.”

“What?” I stared at her, puzzled.

“They’re where you go.” I shook my head, not understanding, and she slid her gaze to the bowl next to me and then back.

“Oh! You mean Dev.”

“I don’t know. Do I?”

My body relaxed, and I smiled. “Oh, Dev. Dev is Dev. He was my first love, from the time we were thirteen until I graduated from high school. I don’t even know if it was love the way other people mean love.”

“No? Explain.”

I laughed. “We were so young. Sometimes, I think we were like those chicks in biology class. We imprinted on each other more than anything else.”

“Sounds to me like as good a description of love as any. But what happened? Why did it end?”

Surprised, I said, “People don’t usually ask that question. We were kids, each other’s first love. No one expects that to last.”

“Including you and Dev?” Her hand held mine as calmly as ever, but the entire rest of her seemed to bristle with skepticism. It occurred to me to wonder if anyone had ever managed to lie to Edith in her entire life.

I shook my head. “No. We expected it to last forever. But then he went away for months and months, even though I asked him not to, and I was lost. I know that sounds trite—lost without him—but I was so directionless. I stumbled through my days like some kind of wounded animal. Sometimes, I’d be driving to someplace I’d been lots of times before, and I’d literally get lost.”

Suddenly, I had a thought. “Oh, gosh, you know what? He was my safe place.”

“Yes, it does sound that way. But you couldn’t carry him around like a turtle shell. When he was gone, the safe place went, too?”

“Yes. I’ve never thought of it that way before, but yes. I hated that I didn’t know who I was without him and that I couldn’t function. So when he got back, I left him. I told him I needed to grow up and figure out how to be a full-fledged, happy person without him.”

“That makes sense to me.”

I groaned. “Except look where it got me. Four years later, and here I am: cold feet on my wedding day, like some idiot cliché.” I covered my face with my hands and pressed hard against my eyes. “I’ve made a total mess of everything.”

“Or maybe it worked, the growing up,” said Edith, quietly. “Maybe it was all leading up to right now.”

I dropped my hands, turned my face to the blue sky, and sat completely still, listening to Edith as hard as I could, even though I knew her words just might upend my life like a table, sending everything crashing, so that I’d have to start over. Or maybe not “even though,” maybe “because.” With the state I was in, I couldn’t say for sure.

She went on, gathering steam. “Maybe this moment is the test. I have been watching you because I’m old and that’s what I do: sit outside of things and watch. I see that you’re a good person, a loving daughter, a true friend. What if it’s time to be your own friend, Clare? If your grown-up self took you by the hand right now, where would she lead you?”

No one should live with someone who scares her.

My heart began to pound, but I sat up as straight as I could. “Could you hold my hand again, just for a minute, before I go?”

“Courage, dear heart,” said Edith, and she held.



I deserved to remember his face until the day I died. I don’t mean his face after, but the way it looked before, when I knocked on his hotel room door, and he said, “Come in,” and I did. His face in the tiny, shiny, hope-lit spot of time before I started talking: the trust, the instant openness, like something blooming, and the joy.

I shut the door and leaned against it.

“Hey,” he said, grinning, turning off the TV, and standing up. He still wore his golf clothes, a pink-and-white-striped polo shirt and frog-green shorts. “You’re totally breaking the rules, you know.”

I held up my hand to stop him from walking toward me and forced myself to keep looking at him.

“Zach, I need to say something.”

“Anything.”

“I am sorrier than I have ever been in my life and than I ever expect to be again, even if I live to be a hundred, but I can’t marry you.”

He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Like I’d thrown something heavy at him, he rocked back on his heels and fell into his chair.