I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(52)
“Clare,” said Dev. “What if we just go?”
“To Virginia?”
“Sure. We could stop and see your parents and my grandparents, have dinner or whatever, maybe do a little poking around Charlottesville, and then—boom—go.”
I laughed, not because Dev had said something funny, but just because I was happy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed aloud out of sheer happiness, but however long it had been, it had been too long.
“Okay, but go where? We should narrow it down,” I said, “because there are a lot of towns on that list. I mean, I have time, but I’m guessing you don’t. You have to work at the lab, right?”
“Yeah. I can probably take one day off, not more than that, though. But listen, Richmond is mentioned more than once, and it’s the biggest city in the shadow ledger. What if we just go there? Today’s Wednesday. I can tell them tomorrow that I need Friday off; you’ll swing by and pick me up tomorrow night, and we’ll head down. Do you want to do that?”
When Dev gets excited about something, his enthusiasm doesn’t just flow, it billows, burgeoning in every direction like the ocean, and I have never been able to resist letting it carry me along. I had no idea what we would do once we got to Richmond. I would have said that the whole enterprise would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, except that I wasn’t sure what the needle would even be, but, right then, in the middle of all the billowing, Dev could have suggested that we head to Madagascar (where I’ve actually always wanted to go) or to the bottom of the Mariana Trench or to a random Walmart (where I never, ever want to go), and I would, without hesitation, have said yes.
“Yes!” I said.
This time, Dev was the one who laughed.
“Good,” he said. “Perfect. I’ll see you tomorrow night.”
The next morning, so early that it was still dark, not nighttime dark, but that grayish, cat-soft dark that happens long after the frogs and bugs stop singing but before the birds start, when the sunrise is still hovering a few notches below the horizon, I got up, threw on some clothes, and went for a walk on the beach. As I set off across the deserted highway, a silver hook of moon still hung in the sky, but by the time I set foot on the sand, it was gone.
Tonight, I would see Dev for the first time since the Saturday afternoon when I had walked into Zach’s hotel room and spectacularly blew to bits our wedding and Zach’s heart and at least a little of mine, too. And that weekend had been the first time Dev and I had seen each other since another Saturday afternoon a few months earlier, one that had been far quieter, far less well attended—just the two of us, no family or friends to bear witness—but equally emotion-fraught, so confusing and painful that almost as soon as it was over, I had gathered up our entire conversation, crumpled it up, and shoved it to the very back of my mind, where it had stayed ever since.
But that morning, with our trip to Virginia just a few hours away, I decided it was time to pull it into the light, spread it out before me, and face it once and for all because my and Dev’s friendship had never been the same after that Saturday afternoon. We had hardly talked in the months between the two Saturdays, and the few times we had, the thing I’d shoved into that dark corner of my mind, as much as I’d tried to pretend it wasn’t there, had come between us. In recent days, as we’d talked about the Blue Sky House mystery, we’d inched closer to each other and to the friendship we used to have, but that balled-up, shoved-away Saturday was still there, and I wanted it gone.
Here’s the thing: I lied when I said I could never resist being carried away by Dev’s enthusiasm. There was one time, just one, on a freezing Saturday in January, a week and a half into the new year, when I resisted.
Zach had found out just two days before that his father was dying, and, despite their rocky relationship, he had taken the news hard. Vulnerable, shaky, as twitchy as a squirrel, more fragile than I’d ever imagined him being, he had begged me to come with him to the lake house in Michigan for the bedside vigil, and I had agreed, a decision I didn’t even quite regret later, after the trip—and Zach—had turned into a nightmare, because it was just a fact that no one with a shred of compassion could have possibly refused him.
The day before we were scheduled to leave, for the first time since Zach had gotten the news about his dad, I was alone in my apartment, drinking coffee loaded with milk, eating toast buttered all the way to the edges the way I liked it, and trying to store up the solitude and the sweet, sweet quiet, knowing I was sure to need both in the days to come, when I got a text from Dev. It said: Hey, Clare, I’m standing outside your apartment building, of all places. And, because, for my entire life since I’d met him, seeing Dev was always a million times better than not seeing him, I texted back: Why are you standing outside texting instead of walking through my front door?
About five seconds later, he knocked, and I opened the door, and, for the next minute and a half or so was so busy being happy to see him—pulling him inside, hugging him, and saying things like wow and yay—that I didn’t notice immediately how drawn and serious he looked. And pale. Dev’s coloring generally tended toward a sort of fawn and russet combination; I could only remember seeing him truly pale on a few occasions, and one of those was when his maternal grandmother died. Dev pale scared me.
“Hey, why do you look like that?” I demanded, holding him at arm’s length.