Page 119 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Of January?”

“Yes.”

I put down the mug I’m drying. “That’s three weeks.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve given them a date.”

“I have given them a date to work towards. It’s not the same as⁠—”

“Julian.”

He stops. He’s standing in my kitchen doorway with his sleeves down and his coat still on, which he hasn’t worn indoors since the storm, and it’s the coat that does it. Not the date. The man has been staying overnight in this house on and off for weeks and tonight he is standing in it wearing his coat.

“Take that off,” I say.

“Penny.”

“Take the coat off or go home. I’m not doing this with you halfway out the door.”

He takes the coat off. He hangs it on the hook that used to be my mother’s, and then he stands in my kitchen with his hands at his sides looking like a man in front of a judge. I lean back against my counter and start talking, because I have been planning this for eight days and I don’t trust myself to keep it quiet much longer.

“I want to say something and I want to get all the way through it,” I say. “You can respond afterwards. Because I’m going to lose it if you help.”

“All right.”

“On the tenth of December you stood in that little room with a journal in your hands and you told me that Black Harbor is the only place on this earth where you are not a guest.” My voice is steadier than I expected. “Do you remember what I said back?”

“You said I was allowed to be in it.”

“And you said that hadn’t always been available to you. And I said I knew. And you said yes, and it wasn’t a little yes, it was a big yes, and I have thought about it a lot.”

“I remember.”

“And this is what you’re telling me now.” I cross my arms because I have to do something with them. “Your plan is Lisbon. Your plan is a house with the shutters closed and a caretaker who genuinely doesn’t know anything and a very dull lawyer in Boston, and six episodes about a locked gate. Then twenty years later somebody arrives up that hill with your face and a different name and starts again from nothing.”

“That is broadly correct.”

“So your answer to being in danger is to become a guest again.”

His expression doesn’t change.

“You told me you left,” I say. “You told me about Nova Scotia and Lisbon and eleven years in Bristol. Decades of leaving. And you told me you outran the grief, but you outran being a person, and you came home, and you have been home for—how long, this time?”

“Two years as Volkov.”

“And overall?”

Julian is quiet for a second.

“A hundred and thirty-four years, near enough,” he says.

“A hundred and thirty-four years. And you’re going to give it to a podcast.”

“I am going to give it to a podcast,” he says, and his voice hardens a little, “because the alternative is to give it to three hundred people outside that gate at two in the morning with telephones, which is the thing Victoria drove three hours in December to describe to you, and which you have not mentioned once since.”

“I’ve thought about it every day.”