I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(32)

“A few weeks ago,” I said, “I had three conversations with Edith, two short, one longer, all during what was supposed to be my wedding weekend.”

Joliet narrowed her eyes. “Supposed to be?”

“That’s right. I broke it off because marrying the man I was supposed to have married would’ve been a colossal mistake. It was Edith who helped me see that.”

It was easy enough for me to say this with assurance today, since that morning, I’d woken up to a voice mail from Zach. He was obviously drunk, but even with the slurring, I had no trouble making out his words: “You bitch. You goddamned, heartless bitch. Who the hell do you think you are to play me this way? Someone must’ve done something seriously shitty to you for you to end up like you are. What do you think of that? Maybe your perfect little childhood wasn’t so perfect after all? Hey, you know what? Go to hell.” It was the verbal equivalent of being punched in the stomach, and for at least fifteen minutes, I lay balled up on the bed of the hotel room, my eyes squeezed shut, fighting off nausea and fear. It was as if Zach kept taking the five stages of grief and shuffling them, and somehow he kept coming back to anger.

Joliet nodded and scratched her chin, thoughtfully. “That makes sense. You can tell from her house that Edith knew true love, so I guess it would stand to reason that she’d also know untrue love. Or true unlove. Or whatever.”

“I loved him. I might still, in a way. But he wasn’t the one. He wasn’t home to me. Edith could tell.”

“So what was she like? Beautiful? Wise? Funny?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” I said. “And calm. I was coming apart at the seams, but she acted like it was all perfectly normal and understandable. ‘Understanding’ is actually a good adjective for her. And I don’t just mean nice. She understood things, saw right to the bottom of them without even seeming to try.”

Joliet nodded.

“Strange as it sounds, I think she might have understood everything in the world.” I smiled. “Well, that was a weird thing to say.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Joliet.

“She was frail. She walked with a cane. I didn’t know she was sick when we met; I just thought she was old. Only her body was frail, though. Her mind moved fast as anyone’s, faster, and her voice sounded like a girl’s.”

“Go on,” said Joliet, then she jumped. Both feet actually came off the ground. “No! Wait! Why don’t I show you around the house? You’ll see what I mean about Edith; it’s like the whole place is a little monument to true love.”

“It sounds like a good place,” I said.

Joliet smiled. “It is.”



It was there, unmistakable. Two chairs in front of the fireplace, tilted toward each other like friends; the matching vintage canoes; the entire third-floor bedroom with its matching bedside flower vases—newly filled, by Joliet, with pink coneflowers—its bed situated so as to offer those sitting up in it curtain-framed views of the back garden and shimmering canal; and oh, that blue sky ceiling, still radiant despite the years. When I told Joliet what Edith had said—You’re his blue sky. When everything else is darkness—she sat down on the bed and looked up at me as if I’d solved the riddle of the universe.

“I just thought it was to remind them that summer would come. Believe me, it gets pretty gray and drab here in the winter. But this, this is even better. They were each other’s blue sky. Oh, be still my heart.”

And above all else, there were the photographs, magnificent black-and-whites framed on every wall of the house. All of them were of Edith. Downstairs were seascapes and waterscapes and landscapes, with Edith so organically a part of them you almost didn’t register her presence. She might have been a gull, a dune, a pine tree. Upstairs, in the third-floor bedroom, close-ups of her face, high-cheekboned, tan, her dark eyes alive beneath peaked brows, her expression ranging from tender to amused to starkly adoring; in one photo, she had the exact look of someone reading a book she loves. Joseph, I thought. Joseph was the book.

“You see what I mean?” said Joliet. “Edith and Joseph, Joseph and Edith. Him loving her through the lens, her loving him right back. This house is a frigging love museum.”

“It is,” I said. “It really, truly is.”

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I’m really just here to check the place out. Maybe a few days, maybe a week.”

Joliet gave me a skeptical look. “I saw your car. It was packed to the gills, as my mom would say. I bet you’ll stay longer than a week.”

I felt my phone vibrate and got it out of my pocket. A text from Zach: I’m so sorry about that call last night. Forgive me, Clare. Forgive me forgive me forgive me.

I looked around at the walls of Edith’s house and said, “Who knows? You just might be right.”



That night, feeling a lot like a girl in a fairy tale, I opened the first locked box I came across—a kind of wooden, oversized jewelry box—trying each key until one fit, and found Joseph Herron’s obituary, which I read with sorrow. War photographer . . . worked with Society of Friends to rebuild Europe . . . photographer for the Lower Delaware Daily Bee . . . beloved friend . . . beloved son . . . cared for through his illness and survived by his beloved wife, former nurse Edith Herron.