Page 117 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Rowan goes quiet.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” he says.

“What is?”

“Every time somebody tells me something is none of my business, it’s somebody with something to lose.” His voice is still mild, still thoughtful. “And sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they aren’t. I’ve spent nine years trying to tell the difference.”

“This isn’t a hospital board or a corrupt mayor.”

“I know.” He looks across the room, where Theo is laughing at something Ben has said and Mabel is correcting a label that belongs to her own museum. “I think you’re probably right. That’s what makes this difficult.”

For the first time all evening, I don’t know what to say to him.

Rowan looks back at me. “I’m not asking you to tell me anything tonight.”

“Good.”

“But if you decide there’s something I should understand, I’d like to hear it.”

I think of Mercy Rood. I think of a child dead of croup in 1809 and a lonely man writing her name down because somebody should. I want to tell him so badly that my jaw hurts.

I don’t.

Mabel arrives to take Rowan away to look at something, and he goes willingly, thanking me for the food on his way, and he means it. Chloe stays where she is for a second.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

“For what?”

She looks after Rowan.

“I don’t know yet.”

Then she follows him.

I break down my tables at half past nine. Lucy helps, which she doesn’t normally do, and Ben Carter helps, which is how I learn that he is twenty-eight and he is from Ohio and that his mother has a bakery. At ten I put six trays in the van in a parking lot with three vehicles in it that were not in this town yesterday morning.

Then I drive up the hill. The gate is open. It’s always open now, which is something I stopped noticing in November and am noticing tonight.

Julian meets me at the door in a grey sweater with his sleeves pushed up.

“How was it?”

“Seventy-one people. Mabel said sixty.”

“Mabel always says sixty.”

“Fern’s parsnips went in the first fifteen minutes.”

“They would.”

He takes my coat and hangs it on the hook by the door, and I follow him down the hall towards the library where the fire is. I am four feet into the room before I see it.

The papered door is open. The shelves inside are half empty. There are journals on the floor in stacks, in date order, and another crate is standing open on the library carpet with straw in it. A dozen volumes are already inside, packed in tissue, with a piece of card on top of them in Julian’s handwriting.

The whole room smells of leather and paper and dust. He doesn’t apologize for it and he doesn’t explain it. He stands there and lets me look at it, which is the single bravest thing I have ever watched that man do.

“He asked about the funeral,” I say quietly.