I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(58)

“What? No. Why?” I’d said.

“On the seventh day, God created Leftover Night! Except it wasn’t God. I think it was my dad or possibly my mom or maybe my older brother, Stephen. Anyway, in our house someone would cook dinner six nights out of seven, and on the seventh night, whoever’s turn it was would have to make a dish that used up all the leftovers from the other nights. So what we’d get was this mishmash of stuff that should absolutely not have worked, but somehow almost always did. That’s your family.” As usual, it was hard to argue with Hildy. From that moment on, we called them Leftover Night.

How bone-deep sweet it was to be with them, to sit at the big dining room table together eating the dishes they’d all brought to share, everyone running roughshod over one another in conversation, ending one another’s stories and sentences, mercilessly interrogating and forcing food on me and Dev. I met Dev’s eyes a couple of times across the table and could tell he was thinking what I was thinking: that it was good—as it had forever been and forever would be good—to sit at that table and be Clare and Dev, the doted-upon children, beloved by all these loud, teasing, bossy, outstandingly kind people.

After dinner, Dev and I took a walk around the neighborhood. It was well after midnight. The streetlamps burned, their blue-white glow pooling, at regular intervals, on the white sidewalks, but most of the windows of the solid, broad-shouldered, brick and stone houses were dark, their lawns spreading solemnly around them. A mailbox stood sentry at the end of every driveway. The big trees sang with cicadas. Dev and I knew every house. We knew every tree and all the places where their roots buckled the sidewalk. We’d known for so long we didn’t even realize we knew; it almost didn’t count as knowing. Every block of this place was jam-packed with the kind of memories you don’t have to conjure up because you are them. Here, nostalgia was rendered moot. Walking here, Dev and I could be fully in the here and now.

“It’s crazy what we’re doing, isn’t it?” I said, with a laugh. “Just heading off to Richmond, like we know where to look and what we’re looking for.”

“We’ll trust our instincts. Hey, I told you that scientists are taking intuition seriously, didn’t I? Have faith, Hobbes.” Then he shrugged and smiled down at the sidewalk. “But, yeah, it is a little crazy.”

“Fun, though,” I said, after a pause. “Even if we don’t find anything, it’s fun to be doing this.”

Dev walked along, looking straight ahead with his hands in his pockets, not saying anything for so long that I began to get nervous again.

“I mean, I think it’s fun to be doing this,” I said.

“Together,” said Dev, giving me a gentle—fairly gentle—elbow to the ribs. “Get it right. It’s fun to be doing this together.”

“Clare and Dev are on the case!” I said, shooting my fist in the air.

“Dev and Clare,” corrected Dev.

We kept walking.

“We’re lucky,” I said. “To have all of them. Our family. Even when we’re not with them, we have them.”

It was the understatement of the century, but I counted on Dev to know what I meant.

“They’re a constant,” he said. “Like pi. Wherever you are, pi is pi.”

“A constant. Like a turtle’s shell, a home you carry around with you everywhere.”

“That, too,” said Dev.

*

I was the one who thought of churches. Later, Dev would always say he was, but I was the one who brought up churches in the first place, and since we were all about intuition, even though I hadn’t specifically mentioned churches as a place to look for clues, the fact that I’d mentioned them at all was clearly my intuition subtly pointing us in the right direction. Or more or less the right direction.

We were driving through Richmond, following our intuition because that’s what we’d agreed to do and also because we didn’t exactly have anything else to follow, when I said, “There are a lot of churches in Richmond. It seems like on every corner, there’s a church.”

It was just a tossed-off comment, the kind of thing you say when you’re driving through an unfamiliar city searching for you-have-no-idea-what located you-have-no-idea-where. But about thirty seconds after I said it, Dev snapped into full-on ponder mode, brows knit, face still, lashes batting, eyes focused. I could almost see his brain working: holding an idea like a Rubik’s cube, turning and twisting it, click, click, click, until all its parts were in the proper place.

When I saw the last click happen and the tension leave his expression, I said, “Okay, give it to me. Not just the end result, but the whole train of thought.”

It was something we had always done, a way, maybe, to stand inside each other’s heads for just a moment. I remembered my own voice saying to Cornelia and my mom about Zach, “Sometimes, I think he won’t be satisfied until he climbs inside my head and lives there.” But this was different. Zach wanted to take possession, at least that’s how it felt; Dev and I just wanted to watch the machinery turn. “It’s like being inside a clock tower,” I’d told him once, and he’d replied, “Or like watching the doughnut machine at Krispy Kreme.”

“Okay. Sanctuary,” said Dev. “What’s the first thing that comes into your head?”