I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(76)

“Maybe that’s what I’m really searching for,” I told Dev. “I mean, answers about whether she survived her injuries or where she went when she left here would be wonderful, but now that we’re here, I realize that mostly what I want is for Sarah to feel real to me. Like those Civil War battlefield field trips we’d take as kids. Pretty much all you got was grass, rickrack fences, maybe a statue or two, but being there in that field, you could picture the battle: the smoke and shouting, the gunfire and the boys dying on the ground. You could feel history prickling the skin up and down your arms.”

Dev stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned to face me. It had happened before over the years I’d known him: I’d say something and Dev would regard me with a pure, almost clinical interest, as if I were a math problem or a scientific theory or a microscope slide or a zoo animal. Which sounds off-putting and possibly creepy, I know, but somehow wasn’t at all. In fact, I’d always liked it: being from time to time a thing that piqued his intellectual curiosity, sparked his neurons, got his wheels turning.

“Literal prickling?” he asked.

“Yes. Like sleet hitting my skin and bouncing off. Little stings.”

“So do you feel Sarah here? Is she prickling up and down your arms?” he asked. He looked down at my bare arms, and I lifted them, pale side up, elbow side down, for his inspection.

“Yes. And Steven and Gareth. And Edith, too, even though she was never here,” I said.

“That’s interesting,” he said.

“It’s not like ghosts,” I said, quickly. “More like an interplay between place and imagination and nerve endings. Or something.”

“Which could be like ghosts, I guess. What people think of as ghosts. I wish I could see what parts of your brain are lighting up when this happens.”

“Whatever is happening, it helps me, the prickling, the unseen things becoming real. It solves something. Fills in a space. I don’t mean it fills a hollow place inside me. It’s more like those ovals on a standardized test: it shades in an answer to a question I hadn’t known I’d needed an answer to,” I said, and then laughed. “Yeah, that sounds weird.”

Dev shrugged. “Good weird, though.”

We kept walking, side by side, the noon sun resting on our shoulders and on the tops of our heads.

“But hey,” I said, suddenly. “What if she was here?”

“Edith? You’re thinking this because of the prickling?”

“More like the prickling got me thinking about how Edith might have been here. Remember how Gordon asked why Edith would leave me her house when she’d only been with Sarah and Steven for a few hours, and I said that I thought she felt responsible for those two the way she did all the other shadow ledger people?”

“Sure, I remember.”

“Well, that could be all it was because I really do think Edith had this big, capacious Miss Clavel soul.”

“Who’s Miss Clavel?”

I waved his question off. “But what if it were more than that? What if, for some reason, Edith drove Sarah and the baby to Canada? And on the way or after they got there, Sarah died. I don’t want to believe that Sarah died, but it would help to explain why Edith felt so responsible for Steven, why she would keep up with him for so many years: Edith is the one who gave Steven to Gareth.”

Dev kept walking, lost in thought, his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the sidewalk in front of him. He nodded. “That would explain why she disappeared from Antioch Beach around the same time Sarah and the baby did. She left with them.”

“Right, and, at some point while she was gone, she found out that the neighbor had seen her and John with Sarah and that John had been arrested,” I said. “She knew that if she went back, she would be, too.”

“So she stayed gone,” said Dev. “Forever.”

We walked on, side by side, our strides matching, our two shadows stretching down the sidewalk, preceding us, sometimes getting lost in the clutter of other shadows—trees, lampposts—but always emerging, clear-cut and together. From time to time, our arms brushed each other, our shoulders bumped. Out of the blue, the thought came to me that I had first held Dev’s hand when I was thirteen years old, and that, touching or not touching, together or miles and miles apart, I had never really let go.

I said, “Edith and I talked a lot about having a safe place, a home. Carrying your safe place around with you, like a turtle. I hope that, wherever she went, she brought Blue Sky House with her.”

Remembering something else Edith had said, I stole a glance at Dev.

“She also talked about people,” I said.

“She did?”

“She said the ones who look like home are home. They’re where you go.”

After a while, Dev said, “Did she say you carry the people around with you, too? Even when you’re away from them?”

“I can’t remember if she said it or if I just thought it.”

“Either way, I agree. That happens. I’ve done it.” He didn’t look at me.

“Where did you carry them?” I asked.

“Her,” said Dev, correcting me. “And—everywhere.”



We checked at two churches and at the hospital at the other end of town to see if anyone knew if there had ever been an orphanage in Canterbury Mills, but no one had ever heard of one. The middle-aged woman working at the hospital front desk said that it was possible abandoned babies had been dropped off at the hospital in the 1950s, but that records from that long ago would be in storage somewhere—she didn’t know where—if they still existed at all.