I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(28)

Even as I tapped out the message, I was dogged by the thought that it might not be true. What if Zach did need me? What if I were his only hope? I understood how arrogant that sounded, but the fact was people did need people. People saved each other all the time, every day. What if, in the grand scheme of things, I was supposed to stick around and save Zach?

It would have been so easy to text again, to tell him that he was right, that I would get on the first plane back to him. I could envision myself typing the words. It would make him so happy. Imagining his happiness was almost more than I could bear.

If you went back, you could never leave again, I told myself. It would be too cruel. If you went back, it would be for forever.

That forever is what sent me backward, reeling away from the edge I’d been standing on. I realized I would probably go back to that edge more than once, but on that day, I turned off my phone, set it down, and ran up the stairs the way I used to when I was a kid, taking them two at a time, clomping like an elephant. I remembered how back then, I hadn’t been running away from anything; I had run out of a pure, free-floating urgency, just because if you were going someplace, you might as well get there fast.

For the next week, I threw myself into business matters. Zach and I had been all set to move from his spiffy apartment to an even spiffier one, Zach having insisted that no marriage could thrive outside the presence of granite countertops and a very sparkly, nearly noiseless dishwasher, so my belongings were already boxed up and ready to go. The image of those stacked and neatly labeled boxes patiently waiting to be carried into a future that no longer existed was one of many that haunted me in the days following our breakup, but the boxes made Hildy’s shipping my stuff to my parents’ house easy enough (easier for me than for Hildy, obviously, who, in typical Hildy fashion, told me to shut the hell up every time I tried to thank her).

I borrowed money from my parents to cover the cost of my half of the apartment security deposit, the moving company’s security deposit, and all the other deposits toward a future that had turned out to be the opposite of secure. I wrote a half-charming, half-frantically-desperate letter to the graduate speech pathology program in Boston that I’d bailed out of when I’d agreed to marry Zach, asking them to please consider reinstating me, if not this year, then—pretty please with sugar on top—the next. I returned wedding gifts and penned endless notes of apology to the givers and to all our would-be-turned-would-not-be wedding guests, and if I say that I felt every word of those notes carve themselves into my skin like in that scary Dolores Umbridge detention scene in the fifth Harry Potter, I’m exaggerating, but only a little.

And, through it all, each night, I spent hours texting and talking with Zach, whose moods encompassed every permutation of heartbroken, from grieving to enraged, from bitter to sweet to bittersweet, from pleading to threatening, from repentant to accusatory, from hopeful to hopeless, sometimes all in a single conversation. It was brutal, and maybe the hardest part was realizing—like a plunge into ice water—that I loved him, a fact that had gotten lost in all the prewedding hubbub of his loving me and in the post-nonwedding hubbub of shattering his heart. True fact: Zach was lovable and I loved him. I could not marry him, but I loved the complicated, contradictory, sweet, knotty humanity of him, and it is one thing to crush the heart of a man who loves you unrequitedly and quite another to do it to a man you love back. I cried a lot. I scrolled through old photos on my phone late into the night. At least a dozen times, I came one breath away from asking him to take me back.

For three weeks, I regrouped, introspected, considered my options, although from the outside (and sometimes from the inside, too) this process looked a lot like taking long walks, staying up late watching old movies with my mom, and lying on various items of indoor and outdoor furniture binge-reading the books from my childhood.

And then, one day, Edith gave me a house.



It started with a letter from a Philadelphia law firm, and the letter led to a phone call, to a few more phone calls, to a car trip, to a meeting at a glossy conference table with a robot-like, staccato-voiced, auburn-haired lawyer named Eloisa Dunne, who explained that Edith Herron had died of cancer just two weeks after I’d met her at the hotel in Virginia and had left me a house in a pretty—or so Eloisa Dunne had heard, not being a beach person herself (a fact that did not surprise me)—coastal town called Antioch Beach, Delaware. Eloisa Dunne was not authorized to give any other information regarding the deceased and in fact knew no other information but explained that the house had been uninhabited for nearly sixty years. However, it was in remarkably good shape, since a property maintenance company had cared for it since Edith Herron had moved away in the 1950s. The company was paid through an anonymous trust that had been put in place not long after her exiting the property, and as there was still at least five years’ worth of money left in the trust, I was obligated neither to live in the house nor to care for it. I need not even go there, although the house was mine to keep or to sell.

“I imagine it would be worth a very tidy sum these days,” said Eloisa Dunne. “Anyway, the residence seems to have been a boardinghouse for a few years, and consequently, it has a name: Blue Sky House.”

A light dawned.

“Say that again,” I said.

“Blue Sky House. Not your typical house name. But quaint, I suppose.”

You’re his blue sky. When everything else is darkness. But is he yours? Edith’s voice, bell-clear and ageless in the morning air.