I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(73)

And slipping in at the last minute to look over my shoulder, tall, slim, dark-eyed, handsome, dead for more than ten years, and invisible to everyone but me, was my father, Martin Grace.

My parents had divorced when I was a toddler, and while my father was alive, until the day he left for London, where he died in a car accident, whenever I was with him, I was the one who felt invisible. He wasn’t mean. On my rare visits with him, he joked and teased and bought me things. He called me “Clare-o the Sparrow.” He just didn’t love me, and I knew it, and once he had died, I knew he never would. That could have been the end of our story, but then, one day, when I was twelve and won a writing award in school, I realized that even if he’d never loved me, I could love him. And that’s when I began to edit him in. That night, when I stood on the stage in the school auditorium, receiving my award, I found an empty seat in the audience, near the back but close enough for him to see my face, and I put him into it. Hello, I told him in my head, I’m glad you’re here. Dances, Christmas dinners, my high school graduation, even at my rehearsal dinner, he was there, a slender presence, half in shadow, stopping by just long enough to absorb the small allotment of love I beamed in his direction and then disappearing like a trick of light.

Now I told him, silently, This is your box, and I am glad you’re here, and then I reached out and turned the key and lifted the lid.

Photographs. Of course, photographs. Photographs always. I almost laughed at how appropriate it was. One of Martin at three or four years old, sitting on his mother’s lap. She is tiny and fair haired and smiling directly into the camera lens, while my father’s dark-haired father stands behind the two of them, his hand on his wife’s shoulder, his face angled downward because he’s looking at his son. Another photo of my father in a high school track uniform, kissing a trophy, his parents standing behind him, caught in midclap. Another of my parents on their wedding day, my mother swanlike and radiant in a narrow cream-colored suit with a portrait neckline, her hair in a French twist, my father cutting a Cary-Grant-like figure, chin dimple and all, in his coat and tie.

I handed the photos to my mother, who glanced through and handed them to Cornelia, who held up the wedding photo and said, “How did you two look like this? Wasn’t it the late eighties? Where is the cotton candy hair? Where are the gargantuan square shoulders?” and my mother laughed.

“Keep going,” said Dev to me.

“I just really want it to be the same ring,” I said. “And as long as that ring box I see in the bottom of this box stays closed, it might be the same ring. But if I get it out and open it and it’s not the same ring, then it definitely won’t be.”

“Remember when we were fifteen and spent an entire day at the pool talking about Schr?dinger’s cat?”

“We were such nerds. How did we turn out to be so cool?”

Dev laughed. “Good question.” Then, he nodded toward the box.

I took out the black suede ring box, stared at it for a few seconds, then handed it to Dev.

“You open it,” I said. “I’m way too nervous.”

He grinned and handed it back. “Not on your life. There might be a dead cat in there.”

“This is no time to talk quantum physics,” said Cornelia, shaking a finger at Dev.

“I was going to make a Pandora’s box joke,” said my mother. “But in the interest of time, I decided not to.”

“Clare,” said Gordon, gently. “Could you please open the damned box?”

I opened it.

It was the ring from the photograph. Same flat, square stone; in the photo it had looked brown or black, but in real life, it was a shade or two darker than apricot jam (“Carnelian,” whispered Cornelia). Same deeply carved gold sides: a shield on one side, a rampant lion on the other. Inside, still just barely legible, were the initials GLG.

I slid the ring onto my forefinger, then reached into my shoulder bag and pulled Edith’s photo from between the pages of the hardback book I’d brought to carry it in and keep it flat. I handed the photo to Dev, who held it up by its edge with his right thumb and forefinger. With his left hand, he reached out, scooped up my hand, and lifted it, balanced on his palm, to his face. For a moment, I thought he was going to kiss it, but he just narrowed his eyes, looking. The tiny twinge of disappointment I felt at his not kissing it took me by surprise, but I forgot all about it—or mostly—a second later when Dev said, “It’s the same ring. Definitely. And with those initials inside, it couldn’t be any other ring, could it?”

“No,” said Gordon, taking off his glasses and bending over to look. “It’s without a doubt the same ring.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “Dev, it’s the same ring!”

Dev smiled, an event as sudden and breathtaking as a white heron breaking from the marsh grass to wing over water, brighter than snow. His fingers closed over mine and squeezed, and for a split second, all I knew was his face and his hand holding mine, and there was no ring and no photograph and we were the only two people in the room.

“How cool is that?” he said, and he let my hand go.

I saw my mother and Cornelia exchange one of their two-second, thousand-word glances, and then Cornelia clasped her hands under her chin, eyes shining, and said, “Very.”

There was one more item in the box. Neither hope nor a dead cat. It was a manila folder held shut with a paper clip. Inside the folder was one slip of paper: an adoption certificate.