I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(75)

“I can see how that could’ve happened,” I said. “Sarah was a fugitive. If she’d gotten caught eventually, who knows what would have happened to Steven?”

“But how hard,” said my mother. “What a devastating choice that would have been for Sarah.”

“All right, but I’m confused about something,” said Gordon, scratching his head. It was a thing I loved about Gordon: he actually scratched his head when he got confused. “John Blanchard says he took Sarah away and was back at work the next morning. But there’s no way he could’ve driven to Canada and back that fast.”

“Maybe he put the two of them on a train or something,” said Dev. “Although Sarah was apparently really injured, probably in ways that would have attracted attention. And he knew the police would be looking for her, so public transportation wouldn’t have been a great idea.”

“Or maybe,” said Cornelia, slowly, “he didn’t take her at all. He just told the police he did. Wouldn’t Gareth have sent a car with an anonymous driver the way he usually did? And if that were the case, John wouldn’t have mentioned it at the trial because he wasn’t about to give away Gareth’s relocation system.”

“Yeah, I didn’t even think of that,” said Dev. “Bet you’re right.”

“Good,” said Gordon. “My second point of confusion is fuzzier.”

“Go for it,” said Clare. “We’re on a roll.”

“Well, none of this is a coincidence, right? Edith was at the wedding—”

“Nonwedding,” I said, automatically and then grimaced. “That’s, uh, what I call it, although usually just inside my own head.”

Gordon smiled. “Edith was at Clare’s nonwedding on purpose. She probably read about it somewhere.”

“Oh, God,” I said, covering my eyes. “The stupid newspaper announcements. In more than one paper, too, with a photo and everything. I was mortified. Who announces an engagement? But Zach said it was a tradition in his family. Like the Barfields are the Kennedys. Like anyone would care.”

“Well, someone did,” observed Dev.

“Oh. Right,” I said. “Well, if those ridiculous announcements brought Edith into my life, I guess they were a good idea after all.”

“So here’s my confusion. While I personally would give Clare a house or anything else under the sun that she wanted,” said Gordon, “why would Edith? Sarah was just a woman who seems to have spent a few hours at her house and then disappeared forever. Why would Edith give her granddaughter a house? Why would she even make a point of showing up at her wedding almost sixty years after she’d met Sarah?”

I sliced off a piece of Bucheron, popped it into my mouth, and contemplated Edith. Finally, slowly, I said, “I think they belonged to her, all of the women and children she helped, at least a little. Not in an ownership way, but I think she felt responsible for them. That’s why she kept the shadow ledger, to keep track, to help her remember them, even after they disappeared. I think it’s how she was.”

Dev said, “But she couldn’t literally keep track of them because they did disappear. She never knew where they went or who they became.”

“All except for Steven. She knew that Gareth adopted him and took him back to New York. She knew that he became Martin Grace. She kept track of him because she could. And then she kept track of me.”

After a pause, Dev said, “You know, we promised we’d tell the Richmond people—Abby and Selby—if we ever found out more of the story. We should call them.”

I met his eyes. “We will. But why don’t we wait?”

“For what?” asked Dev.

“Until we get back from Canada.”





Chapter Twenty-Five

Clare




About two hours into our road trip from the airport in Bangor, Maine, to Canterbury Mills, as we were driving our tiny rental car through a tiny town full of tiny lakes, a dozen of them, like twelve dropped silver dollars, I realized that I was completely happy. And if the town seemed like something caught in the past, with its simple black-roofed houses and its single downtown street lined with storefronts (bakery, coin laundry, drugstore, shoe store, movie theater, coffee shop), a white church at one end, I was fully—mind, body, and soul—rooted in the now, as present in the present as I had ever been.

Dev was driving, one tan hand on the wheel. We had the windows open. Dev’s hair shifted around in the breeze. We had talked straight through the flight and through the rainy first hour and a half of the car ride but the rain had stopped, and now we were sitting in a loose, amiable silence surrounded by the crayon-bright, washed-clean world. Right then, what lay behind—all those mistakes I’d made—didn’t matter, and what lay ahead—all those blanks we hoped to fill in—didn’t matter either. The moment was complete—a brimming glass, a terrarium—and every question I’d ever had felt answered.

“I wish I could keep it,” I said.

“What?”

“This.”

Dev’s profile didn’t move a muscle, but a pink flush appeared in the center of his right cheek.

“So keep it,” he said.



When we got to Canterbury Mills, we parked the car on a side street and walked around, sticking to the neighborhoods and the little offshoot country roads because we figured that those were more likely places for a safe house than the downtown. I think I half expected a brass plaque nailed next to a front door or a historical marker stuck in the middle of a front lawn saying something like: This house harbored Sarah Giles and her baby, Steven, and a lot of other people. It was a good place. Of course, we came across exactly nothing like that, but somehow just walking down those streets and seeing houses that could have been that house gave me something I hadn’t known I was missing.