I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(66)

The thought of never being with Zach again makes me wish I were dead.

I just need this pain to end.



Post after post after heartbroken, regretful, semisuicidal post, all put up an hour ago. The proximity in time creeped me out, made him feel somehow near me, lurking, which I know didn’t make sense, but I was rattled, and by rattled I mean I felt like either taking a shower or throwing up or both, if not simultaneously, but instead, I deleted my account. Then I shot off a text to Zach: What the hell is wrong with you? Was that supposed to be a joke? Because it wasn’t funny. As I’m sure you know.

I called Dev back. “It had to be Zach. He’s the only person who knew my password. I guess I should have changed it back in June, but I’d forgotten he had it.”

“Well, he didn’t forget,” said Dev. “Obviously.”

“I’m sorry you were worried.”

“Morried,” said Dev, correcting me. “Wad. And I’m sorry I was both of those completely nonexistent adjectives.”

“That’s okay. For the record, I don’t feel any of the things he posted. Not a whit.”

“No one says ‘whit,’” said Dev. “But, hey, that’s good news.”

“Mentally and emotionally, I’m tip-top.”

“Which is more than we can say for Zach.”

“Thanks to me,” I said.

“Nope, you can’t take credit for this. Creepiness of this magnitude had to be in there, waiting to happen. Sooner or later, it would have.”

“I hope so. No. I mean I hope not. I don’t know what I hope, but while we were eating dinner in that Thai place?”

“Yes?”

“He texted me the same text four times: I know you’re with him right now, I know you’re with him right now, I know you’re with him right now, I know you’re with him right now.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” said Dev.

“I didn’t want you to get morried the way you do.”

“Seriously. Do you think he did know?”

“Of course not. How could he?”

“He could have had you followed, hired a private detective or something.”

I laughed. “Zach might be crazy, but he’s not that crazy.”

“It would be good to know,” said Dev, “just exactly how crazy he is.”

My phone vibrated in my hand, and I took it from my ear and looked at the screen. Zach.

“He’s calling me. I should get it,” I said.

“Okay. But Clare? Don’t tell him where you are.”

“I won’t. Don’t morry. He doesn’t even know this place exists.”

*

He claimed to be drunk, a claim I had no trouble believing, since I could practically smell the alcohol through the phone. He said he’d been drinking more lately, which his brother, Ian, said was understandable, even normal, even wise, at which point I wanted to remark that his brother, Ian, might not be the ideal go-to person when it came to identifying wisdom, but I refrained. He talked about numbing the pain and blunting the anger, but then he mentioned that he was angrier than ever, not every second, but in spurts. He talked about his sister, Ro, about how, for some reason, he couldn’t stop thinking about her, about how all his conversations with Ian seemed to lead back to Ro. He said he’d only written on my Facebook page what he wished I were feeling—presumably including the “wish I were dead” sentiment—but knew I didn’t feel, unless deep down I actually did, which he suspected was true, since he knew the two of us would end up together in the end, and if he knew this, he bet I knew it, too, deep down. I told him, again, that I would always care about him, but that I could never be with him. He ignored this. I told him that maybe he should consider going to a doctor, talking to someone, getting some help. He ignored this, too. I apologized, again, for hurting him. He didn’t ignore this. He said that I should be sorry, that he hoped I’d be fucking sorry for the rest of my goddamned life, and then he hung up.



“How about I make a quick visit? Just to be sure you’re safe,” my mother said when she called later that night. “I heard about the Facebook thing.”

I sighed. “From Dev?”

“From Cornelia who heard it from Hildy who heard it from Aidan who heard it from Dev.”

“I only heard it from Dev an hour ago,” I grumbled, sounding exactly like my fourteen-year-old, privacy-deprived, indignant self.

The next day, when my mother arrived, in a whirlwind of sunglasses and linen and knife’s-edge pleats and blondness, I ran out so fast to throw myself into her arms that I nearly mowed down a squirrel. When she’d managed to untangle her elegant limbs from my hug, she took off her sunglasses and smiled, and I was struck for the hundred-millionth time by how my mother would have looked exactly like Grace Kelly if only Grace had bothered to be just a teensy bit more polished.

After we carried in her sleek overnight bag and the four tons of groceries she’d brought, I gave her a tour of the house, which I’d begun to think of as my house, although somehow this didn’t seem to make it any less Edith’s. My mother oohed and ahhed and ran her hand along some things and gazed at other things and got solemn and expressed reverence in all the right places. We made sandwiches and picnicked at the beach and then went for a long walk on the sand, during which my mother in her black one-piece swimsuit, raffia sunhat, and a silk sarong knotted around her hips with the same nonchalant, maddening perfection with which she knotted scarves around her neck, turned the heads of men—and plenty of women—a third her age, a phenomenon she noticed not one whit.