I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(71)

They’ve found us, she thought bleakly. We’re caught; all that driving was for nothing; oh, poor Sarah, poor Steven, poor little baby.

The silhouette of a man in a hat materialized at the kitchen door, and then he was turning a key in the lock, and then he was pushing the door open, and then he was standing in the kitchen staring at her and saying, “Jesus Christ, you nearly scared me to death.”

George.

“Oh, George,” she whispered, pressing her hand to her heart. “Thank God it’s only you.”

“Don’t thank God, yet,” he said, grimly, and switched on the kitchen light.

Her vision swam in the flood of brightness, and she lifted a hand to her eyes to shade them. When she took her hand away, George was looking at her with a strange mixture of surprise and confusion, as if he’d expected someone else entirely. Under his gaze, she felt naked and intensely conscious of the fact that she hadn’t set eyes on him since the morning after the night they’d made love for the final time. Reflexively, she pulled the robe more tightly around her.

“Edith,” he said, softly.

She lifted her hand to ward him off, but he didn’t move in her direction. He just stood.

“Turn off the light,” she said. “And please keep your voice low. Thomas sleeps in a chair in the downstairs bedroom where Sarah stays. We don’t want to wake him, poor man. Or Sarah.”

George turned off the light, and the two of them stood in the moon-drenched kitchen, waiting for their eyes to adjust, for the other to come into focus.

“What did you mean by that?” Edith asked.

“By what?”

“‘Don’t thank God, yet.’”

In the moonlight, Edith watched his face go from soft to hard.

“John Blanchard is in police custody,” he said.

“John?” said Edith. Light-headed, she pulled out a kitchen chair, almost toppling it over, and fell into it like a sack. “For what?”

“What else? Helping a murderess and kidnapper to escape.”

“How?”

“You were seen, the two of you. In your house. With Sarah.”

Edith raked her fingers into her hair and shut her eyes. “Oh, no.”

“You should have sent him away as soon as he showed up with her and the baby,” George said, coldly.

Edith opened her eyes and stared at George Graham, trying to balance all the contradictory parts of this man who had spent money and years making women and children safe and yet who could dismiss Sarah and Steven as if they were nothing.

Finally, she said, “You never see their faces, do you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Or hear their voices. You don’t know the color of their hair or how they jump at noises or flinch when they’re touched. They aren’t real to you. They aren’t even stories, are they? They’re what? Names on your list? Tally marks?”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“But your own story, you keep that one close, don’t you? And all the characters in it are flesh and blood.”

George turned his face away.

“I’ll bet you remember the color of that minister’s hair, the one who sent your mother away when she came to him for help.”

“Enough,” he said, through tight lips.

“You didn’t see Sarah, the shape she was in, and with a newborn baby. No one could have sent them away.”

“I take your point, Edith,” said George. “And still here we are. John caught like a rat in a trap. Your house compromised forever, useless to all those women who need help. And you and Sarah—” He broke off.

Edith reached up and rubbed her temples, tried to clear her head. She said, “They’ll come after us, won’t they? Sarah and Steven and me.”

“They’re already looking,” said George, and then asked, sharply, “did you tell Blanchard where you were going?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said.

She lifted her head. “Good?”

“Yes. I don’t know the man, but he seems to be the noble type. I’m sure he’ll do what he can to steer the authorities in all the wrong directions.”

“You’re right,” said Edith. “John’s not a liar by nature, but he will lie to help us.”

She imagined John, her friend, the most decent, innately kind person she knew, locked in a cage like an animal.

“Good.”

“But I’ll have to go home eventually,” said Edith.

George sat down at the table with her and she watched him look at her, taking her in, his eyes growing distant and thoughtful, and then, after a few moments, something shifted, snapped into place, and Edith understood that she had just seen him make a decision.

“If you go home,” he said, “you will be arrested and will almost certainly go to prison. At some point, you will be given a choice: tell them Sarah’s whereabouts and be granted some sort of leniency or refuse to tell them, in which case . . .” He shrugged.

That shrug made her want to slap him. How easy it would be to allow herself to hate him, to turn him, in her mind, from a man into a monster. But what good would that do? And anyway, it would be a lie. Edith thought of Sarah’s husband. It was possible that there were monsters afoot in this world, but she knew that George Graham was not one of them.