I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(84)

“Hello?” he said and before we could say anything else, the polite smile faded from his face, and, in a hushed voice, he uttered the most amazing thing: “You’re Clare.” Then, looking at Dev, he said, “And I’m betting you’re Dev.”

“You’re right,” I said, awestruck. “But how did you know?”

The man stepped out onto the deck and offered me his hand to shake.

“My name is John,” he said.



“She wanted to come back to Antioch Beach so that she could visit me,” he told us.

Dev and I sat on a leather sofa in John’s house, the beamed ceiling soaring above us and the butter-yellow sunlight flooding in on three sides. Fitzy, the dog, sat at my feet.

“But even though by then the police had stopped looking for her, I worried that if she came back, they’d have no choice but to at least bring her in for questioning. She had her fresh start, hard won as it was, and I wanted her to keep it. But she wrote me every week for four years, and even though she wasn’t with me, she was. Just knowing she was out there, waiting for me, made me less alone. When I got out of prison, I packed up everything I owned and came to find her.”

He leaned back in his chair, looked around at the walls covered with beautiful black-and-white photographs, and sadness crossed his face like the shadow of clouds passing over water. He smiled. “We were married fifty-three years.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Dev.

“Thank you,” said John. “We knew when she got diagnosed that she didn’t have long, just six months or so, and she decided she wanted to find you before she died. We plotted and schemed, and then she found the engagement announcement with your wedding date in some online newspaper, and it all fell into place.”

“Why do you think she didn’t just tell Clare who she was?” asked Dev.

John cocked his head, thinking.

“I’m not so sure. She did promise Gareth she’d never get in touch with Martin, and not because Gareth made her promise. She wanted Martin to be happy, not to be torn between two sets of parents. She never stopped missing him, not for a single day, and she just kept up with him from afar as best she could. His death hit her hard. It was a dark day when we found out about that. Afterward, she kept up with you, Clare.”

“I’m glad,” I said. “I’m so glad.”

“You know, even though she’d made that promise, she might have told you who she was the weekend of your wedding. She didn’t go there with a plan, but she said she might tell you. So many years had gone by—decades—since she’d made that promise. But then she found you and talked to you and decided to leave you Blue Sky House instead.”

Slowly, I nodded. “I think I understand that,” I said.

“You broke off your engagement, I guess,” said John, with a grin.

“I did. It was the right thing. Edith is the one who helped me see that.”

“She thought you would.”

“How did you know Dev was Dev?” I asked.

John’s eyes twinkled. “Edith told me she met Dev and saw you two together. In my experience, Edith’s faith is almost never misplaced, and she said she had faith that you’d find your way home.”



We talked for hours, until all the windows went dark. John told us about Edith’s job as a nurse at the camp in the summertime and about how, using just the initials E.H.W., she sold her photographs in galleries, sometimes for breathtaking sums of money. He told us how he’d trained to become an accountant in prison and how, after all that had happened, spending his days in the cool, abstract company of numbers was a relief. He had changed his last name to Smith when he left Antioch Beach and kept it even after he and Edith got married.

“But that was only on paper,” he said. “In our private, everyday lives, we went by the same name.”

Edith and John had spent the last nearly five and a half decades being John and Edith Waterland.

When we were leaving, he hugged me and kissed me on the temple and asked us to please keep in touch, to come back anytime. I told him that he was my grandfather, the only one I had ever had, and that I wasn’t about to let go of him.



Afterward, when Dev and I were sitting in the car, just before we left Edith and John’s house, Dev said, “You told John you thought you understood why Edith just gave you her house without telling you who she was. Do you think she knew what would happen?”

“I only know what I feel,” I said. “I feel like she knew everything. Like she made everything happen, every single thing leading up to right now, this very moment.”

“The two of us sitting in this car together in front of her house?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the next moment and the one after that?” asked Dev, twining his fingers in my hair.

I recognized the excitement billowing in his voice, as if our future together would be the most fun in the world, one adventure after the next. Who was I to resist excitement like that?

Oh, this here and now, this particular snapshot fragment of forever. Dev talking to me, his face lighting up the darkness: one more thing to carry, to bring with me wherever I went.

“I think she would say the rest is up to us,” I said.