I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(79)

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dev swipe a surprised glance at me.

“Nope,” said Kate, smiling. “You never do.”

*

It was a white farmhouse, deeper than it was wide, with black shutters, a front porch, and a single dormer window in the center of the gabled roof. The window reminded me instantly of the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dollar bill, which shows you how whirring and discombobulated my brain was. Don’t be an idiot, I told myself, it looks nothing like that. But even so, as Dev and I sat in the car and looked at the house, I couldn’t help feeling that it was looking back.

“You ready?” said Dev.

“I don’t think so,” I said. In my ears, my voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

“Oh. Well, that’s okay. We can sit here for a while or leave or whatever you want.”

“No, I want to go knock on the door. I really do. I want to meet Sarah. It’s just that my lungs seem to have stopped working, and my legs seem to have turned to wood, and I really don’t see how, under these circumstances, I’m going to get out of this car,” I said, my voice bouncing and echoing off the stone sides of the well.

“Hey,” said Dev. “Clare.”

I sat rigid, staring at the house.

“Look at me,” said Dev.

“Okay,” I said but my neck couldn’t remember for the life of it how to do that.

Dev reached over, took my chin in his hand, and gently turned my head so that I faced him. “What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing. I’m not afraid.”

Dev waited.

I sighed. “I don’t know. It just feels weird to have a grandmother. I never expected to have one. And she never expected me. What if she isn’t happy to see me? What if I don’t see any of myself in her? What if she sees me and remembers giving her baby away and gets upset?”

Dev moved his hand so that it was cupping the side of my face, but, of their own accord, my eyes shifted sideways toward the house. “She’ll be happy to see you,” said Dev.

“If I don’t go in, if I just stay here in this car and then leave, she’ll always stay the person who was glad I came. But if I get out and go up to that house, she might become someone else.”

Dev laughed. “Old Schr?dinger again. There’s a live cat in this box, Clare. I just know it.”

The dormer window eye regarded me coolly. It gave nothing away.

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t just sit there. Help me do this,” I said.

“Look at me.”

With effort, I pulled my attention away from the house. There was Dev’s face, his smooth brown skin and his hair falling on his forehead and his eyes, dusky Blue Ridge blue. And maybe because we were in a new place or because my brain was swirling around like a murmuration of starlings, even though I had seen his face more times than anyone could count, it was new, too.

“Your eyelashes,” I said, marveling. “They go all the way around, like a ruffle.”

Dev smiled. “Did you think maybe they’d stopped?”

I breathed in and my lungs filled all the way up with air.

“You’ll go with me?” I said.

“Where else would I go?”

“Then I’m ready.”

Halfway up the brick walkway, I took Dev’s hand or maybe he took mine, and we walked, our breath making clouds in the cold air.

As I knocked on the door, I realized that I had no idea what I would say.

“Oh no,” I said. “What should I tell her? I haven’t even—”

But there she was, in a light blue sweater that matched her eyes. Sturdy, very wrinkled, her steel-gray hair coming to a point at the top of her forehead like a valentine. Her eyes were light blue. Mine are dark brown. She was short and solid. I am tall and rangy. I searched for myself in her face but didn’t find me.

“Hello,” she said, uncertainly. “Can I help you?”

“My grandfather was a man named George Graham,” I told her.

For a moment, her expression went blank. Then she smiled, dimples appearing, like magic, in her cheeks. “Oh, you,” she said, tears making her eyes shine. “You. After all these years. You beautiful girl. Come in, come in, come in.”



She made us tea with honey. Holding the steaming mug in my hands and drinking the tea made me feel like a child with a sore throat who someone good was taking care of. We told her the story, tag-teaming it, beginning with my nonwedding, and Sarah sat with her shining eyes and didn’t speak, except to murmur, now and then, “Oh, dear Edith, dear, dear Edith.”

I finished up with Tess giving us directions to Sarah and Tom’s house, and when I stopped, Sarah said, “What a journey Edith sent you two off on!”

Dev said, sheepishly, “Well, just Clare, really. She didn’t know I’d be coming, too.”

“Hmm,” sniffed Sarah. “I wouldn’t be so sure. Edith was a person who knew things. Well, I suppose it’s my turn now?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“All right then. I got sicker after Edith and George—or Gareth rather—left.”

Heartsick, I thought with a pang, because she had given her baby to Gareth.