I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(51)

“Oh! My! God!” I screeched. “Move with him? Like live with him? Like you’d live together?”

“You’re literally hurting my ear.”

“Screw your ear. Are you?”

“He’s renting this apartment, and he said he’d like it if I’d live there with him, but he also said if that idea falls under the heading of moving too fast, there’s another apartment for rent in the same building, and if it makes me more comfortable, I could live there.”

“So does it?” I said.

“Does it what?”

“Make you more comfortable.”

“Hell, no,” said Hildy.

I tossed my head back and laughed with pure, giddy, reckless joy. “This is my lifelong dream!”

“You haven’t known me your whole life.”

“Of course I have, and probably before that, too,” I scoffed.

Universal truth: some people you’ve known since birth and you’ve just barely met them; others you’ve known for four years and they’ve been your friend since before you were born.

“True,” said Hildy.

“But how is this amazingly annoying? It’s not. It can’t be.”

“Because: Washington.” She slapped the word down like a piece of raw liver onto a butcher block.

“You don’t like Washington? It’s nice. Where in Washington?”

“Some square or circle or something. But nice or not nice, George Washington was a man. I live in Ann Arbor, the only damn city in the country that’s named after a woman instead of a damn man, and Aidan wants me to move. From Ann to a man. Ms. Arbor is turning over in her grave, damn it,” she said. I heard a pounding sound; Hildy’s fist hitting the table. I’d recognize her pound anywhere.

“You’re maintaining that there was actually at some point a woman named Ann Arbor?” I asked.

“Yes. She founded the city. Or something.”

“I think Ann was the name of the wives of the two men who founded the city, neither of whom had the last name Arbor. Although even that might just be speculation.”

“Regardless.”

“And anyway: Charlottesville,” I said.

“What?”

“The town where my parents live, where I moved when I was eleven. It’s named after a woman. Princess Charlotte who became Queen Charlotte when she married George the Third.”

“Hmm.”

“And there’s a nearby town named Louisa, named after I have no idea, but it must’ve been a woman, right?”

“Possibly.”

“And actually, the whole state of Virginia is named after Elizabeth the First,” I said. “Elizabeth the Virgin Queen.”

“Now, that’s getting kind of personal, isn’t it?” said Hildy.

A light clicked on inside my head, the kind with a dimmer switch, dialed down to dim.

Char, Lou, Rich.

“Char, Lou, Rich,” I murmured.

The light got brighter.

“Char, Lou, Rich!” I cried.

“What the hell?” said Hildy.

“Hildy, hold on, just hold on, okay? I’ll be right back.”

I leapt out of the living room chair I’d been sitting in and ran to where the shadow ledger lay open on the kitchen table. I grabbed the notebook I’d been using and a Ticonderoga pencil and started writing: Roan, Char, Fred, Port, NNews, Lou, Hamp, Lynch, Rich, Rich, Rich . . .

The light flared bright as a full moon. I grabbed my phone.

“Hildy, listen! Roanoke, Charlottesville, Fredericksburg, Portsmouth, Newport News—God, if Newport News had been a snake, it would have bitten me—Louisa, Hampton, Lynchburg. Richmond! Richmond! Richmond!”

“Good Lord, you’ve lost your mind,” said Hildy.

“It’s Virginia,” I sang. “They all came from Virginia! Hildy, I love you, and I’m so glad you’re moving to Washington to live with Aidan, Aidan whom I could not love more, and I will call you back and explain everything, but I have to go call Dev.”

“Of course, you have to call Dev!” said Hildy, pounding the table again. “You’d be crazy not to always, always call Dev. But call me back so I know you haven’t been dragged off to the loony bin, the special one for people who can’t stop shouting Richmond, okay?”

“I promise.”

“I love you, too,” she said.

“Richmond!” I yelped and hung up.

*

We decided I would pick up Dev in Wilmington on my way home.

When I’d called him to tell him about my Virginia brainstorm, once my words stopped tripping over themselves and he could understand what I was saying, and after the rousing round of verbal high-fiving that followed, he said, “So what’s next?” And as soon as he said this, I realized “So what’s next?” was my indisputable, hands-down, all-time favorite question. I had not prior to that moment even considered having a favorite question, but at that second, I knew that I did have one, and this was it. It was so game, so chummy, and it just smacked of hope. If “So what’s next?” had a face, I would’ve kissed it on both cheeks.

“Well, I can try to find out if either John Blanchard or Edith had a Virginia connection,” I said. “One of the newspaper articles I read said that John was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and moved to Antioch Beach as a young man. I could look up Blanchards in Baltimore and ask whomever I find if there’s a Virginia branch of the family he might have visited, I guess, although it’s a fairly common name. It could take a while to track someone down. And I haven’t stumbled upon anything about Edith’s life before she came to Antioch Beach. I might still. There are some of her locked boxes that I’ve opened but not gone through yet. Some of them were like specimen boxes or something. They had butterflies and other bugs inside, pinned and labeled in Edith’s handwriting. One had leaves, pretty crumbled by now. One had shells. The rest of them seemed to just have photographs in them, some hers, some Joseph’s. Should I start with the boxes?”