I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(50)

Edith found herself breathing hard, on the edge of tears, but she wouldn’t break down. She gathered herself. “I understand that you worry about me,” she said, softly. “I do so appreciate that. But I’m fine. Nothing is going on here that shouldn’t be; I promise you that.”

For a moment, they stood staring at each other, Edith balanced on the fine line between evasion and confession, John between personal loyalty and the law. If they slipped, it was anyone’s guess onto which side each would land, but for that hour of that night, anyway, they held steady.

“I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Edith,” John said, fiercely, and then he spun around and left, allowing, for the first time, the screen porch door to bang shut behind him.



For the next week, Edith neither saw nor heard from him. She had put him in a terrible position; she knew that. John took his job seriously, and his reputation as a police chief was golden, unassailable, a fact he cherished. Beyond that, deeper even than that, he was honest to the core, hopelessly honest, he’d once told her, laughing; even as a kid, even to get himself out of sticky situations, he was fundamentally unable to lie. But you aren’t asking him to lie, she told herself, you’re only asking him to look the other way. In her heart, though, she understood that for a man like John Blanchard, the two amounted to the same thing. For that whole week, Edith fluctuated wildly between serenity born of the rock-solid faith that he would choose friendship over duty and desperate panic that he would not. In the dark moments, raw-nerved and fearful, she waited, her entire body tensed, for disaster, disgrace, ruin to knock at her door.

What happened instead was this. One morning, a week after John had left and slammed the door behind him, a package appeared on her porch. No stamps, no note, just a neat bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. Edith brought it into the house and opened it at the kitchen table. Inside were two boxes of gauze pads, three rolls of bandages, three rolls of bandage tape, and a large tube of antibiotic ointment. Edith dropped into a kitchen chair, put her face in her hands, and wept, not only out of relief but also shame at how she had underestimated John. He hadn’t chosen to simply look the other way; he hadn’t even chosen friendship, not really, because a stranger’s damaged face had surely weighed in the balance as much as his affection for Edith, probably more. John had considered all his options, and despite the risks, despite all it would cost his conscience, and she knew it was a great deal, John had chosen to help.





Chapter Eighteen

Clare




“You want to hear something amazing and also amazingly annoying?” demanded Hildy.

“Who would say no to that?” I said.

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Hildy. “The barista at the Sweet Bean, for instance, the one with the Andrew-Jackson-twenty-dollar-bill hair? He had no interest whatsoever. Actually, if it is a possible thing to have negative interest, and I mean aggressively negative interest, this guy did. I asked him the same question I just asked you, and before the words were fully out of my mouth, you could just feel the apathy coming off him like—” She groped around for the proper simile.

“Fumes?” I suggested.

“Radioactivity. When it came to apathy, he was a—whatdayacallit—isotope.”

“I don’t think all isotopes are radioactive.”

“Ah, but you don’t know, do you? You know who would know?”

I groaned. “Yes.”

“Dev, that’s who. Where is that Dev when you need him?”

“I know where you’re going with this,” I told her.

“Where?”

“Where you always go with it.”

“Face it, Clairol. He’s the lox to your bagel. The gin to your tonic. The Fig Newtons to your cheddar cheese.”

“Nobody, not a single human in the history of the world except for you has ever thought for even one second that those last two things go together.”

I could hear the shrug in her voice when she said, “It’s essentially the same as apple pie and cheddar cheese.”

“No. No, it is not.”

When I go too long without actually talking to Hildy—or more important, having her talk to me, hearing her actual words in her actual semiblaring, semimusical in-the-manner-of-bagpipes voice—my soul starts to wilt.

“You’re talking to him, again,” she said, smugly. “Practically every night.”

“How would you know that?”

“Aidan was just here visiting me, and he happened to call Dev, and I happened to grab the phone out of his hand.”

“And Dev happened to mention that we’d been talking?”

Another audible shrug: “There may have been interrogation involved. Just a tad.”

I considered explaining to Hildy that Dev and I were just friends, until I remembered that I’d explained this to her at least three hundred million times before to absolutely no avail.

“So are you going to tell me or not?” I said.

“Tell you what?”

“The amazing and amazingly annoying thing,” I said.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“I’m changing the subject back, which isn’t the same thing.”

“Fine,” Hildy said. “So Aidan starts his new job in Washington, D.C., next month, and he asked me to move there.”