I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(72)

“Ordinarily, if you left now, you wouldn’t know where Sarah and Steven were because, before you’d even arrived at home, they would have been transported from here to their next place,” said George. “But moving Sarah in her condition is obviously impossible. She and Steven will be here for weeks, maybe longer.”

“I would never tell them where she was,” Edith said.

“You’d be surprised at what you might do if you were facing a long prison sentence,” he said. “So going back wouldn’t just be disastrous for you; it could put Sarah and Steven in danger, as well.”

“I wouldn’t betray them.”

He seemed not to have heard her. “I’m sure John Blanchard will buy you some time. There’s no need to leave right away, but you can’t stay here forever. Neither can Sarah and Steven. When the police realize they’ve been misled, they’ll eventually start looking in the proper direction. You had to have stopped places on the way; people saw your car.”

She remembered the gas station attendant, politely listening to her exhausted ramblings. She nodded.

“Who knows? It’s possible that they’ll never trace you or Sarah to this house. It helps that you’re in another country now. But they might find you,” said George.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Stay until you—until you’re ready and all the plans are in place. And then let me relocate you.”

Edith fell back in her chair, stunned.

“You mean never go back?”

“I’ve done it for many women, as you know. And I’ll be honest, fugitive life is hard. You will spend years looking over your shoulder. Some of the women, especially the ones with children, even regret their decision to leave; although so far, none have been desperate enough to go back.”

She shook her head.

“But my life. My entire life is back in Antioch. I have nothing else anywhere else. No family. No real friends. No work. My clothes, my cameras, my boxes of important things, I’ve brought none of that with me here.”

Confused and frightened, she thought that if only she explained her situation as clearly as possible, he would see that she had to go back.

“Edith, don’t you understand that life as you’ve known it ended the moment you took Sarah and her baby into your house?” said George, quietly.

“John’s life, too. How can I let him take responsibility for everything?”

“It can’t be helped.” Edith heard a note of regret in his voice.

“You help him,” she said. “Whatever I do, wherever I end up, you help John however you can. Will you do that?”

“Yes,” said George.

She nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And what about my house? It’s more than a house to me.” It’s Joseph. All that I have of Joseph.

George sighed. “I can do whatever you want me to do about your house. Sell it or—”

“No!” said Edith, forgetting to whisper. She lowered her voice. “Never.”

“As you wish. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Please don’t speak as if I’ve decided.”

Edith’s hands lay palms down on the table. George reached out as if to hold one of them, but then just set his own hand on the table between the two of hers.

“Edith, you were wrong about me. Those women are real to me, all of them, even though most of them I never see.”

Edith scanned his face, and noticed, for the first time, how tired he looked.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “It was unfair.”

“You’re real to me,” said George, quietly. “I know the color of your hair, and I want you to have a life. Let me help you.”

Edith sat still, struggling to absorb what was happening, but then she heard May moving around on the floor over their heads. At any moment, she might come down the stairs.

“Think it over. Take your time,” said George. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. And when you’ve decided, I will put it all in motion.”

The full meaning of what they had been saying to each other hit her all at once, and the world seemed to spin.

Edith had written down the names of the bruised and hollow-eyed and homeless, but who would make a record of her name and where she’d been? Who would catalog her injuries, document the tilt of her black brows, her laugh, her two hands cradling a coffee cup or knotting back her wayward, wind-tangled hair?

Nothing is decided, she reminded herself, nothing. But when she closed her eyes and tried to hold on, to her house, her canoes, her kitchen table, her boxes, her blue ceiling, Joseph’s photographs; when she tried to reach her hands around all of it, it was as if every solid, holy thing she’d ever loved had turned to water and was already pouring through her fingers and rushing away, away, away.





Chapter Twenty-Four

Clare




Compared to Edith’s boxes, the box my mother held out to me was pretty drab, no golden, swirl-grained oak or fragrant cedar or mahogany shiny as a mirror, no black lacquer tops or velvet linings: just rubber-band-colored, fireproof metal with a round lock on top, the key stuck inside it. But this had been my summer of finding truth in locked boxes, and this one just might be the last, so I took it from my mother’s hands with the care and respect you’d offer any holy grail, any sanctuarium. I set it on the coffee table in my parents’ living room, and all of us gathered around: my mother, Gordon, Cornelia—who was in town dropping off her children at her parents’ house for a week of, as she put it, “unfettered joy, limitless pie, and irreversible spoiling”—Dev, whom I had picked up on the way down, and I.