Page 120 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Then you know it is not an imaginary risk.”

“I know it’s not.”

“Then what precisely am I to do?” He doesn’t shout. It’s worse than shouting. It’s the flat voice, the enough voice, happening for the first time. “Give me the other plan. I would take it. I’ve spent four hundred years looking for another plan and I’ve never once found one. If you have one I will hear it gladly.”

“I don’t have a plan. I’ve got about half of one and it isn’t any good yet.”

“Then—”

“But I’d like you to notice,” I say, “that I’m not the reason you’re going.”

That stops him.

“What?”

“You keep doing this thing where you look at me while you say it. Like I’m the cost. Like the terrible part of going to Lisbon is me.” I move away from the counter. “So I want to take myself out of it, because I think I’m making it impossible for you to see the actual question. And the only way to do that is to say this out loud.”

“Penny.”

“I’ll come with you.”

He goes absolutely still.

“I mean it. Say the word and I’ll come. I’d have to sell the building, which would take a year, and I’d cry about it for another one, and Lucy would never entirely forgive either of us.” My throat is threatening to close, but I keep going. “I’d do it anyway. If the answer is Lisbon, then the answer is Lisbon. I’d rather be with you in a rented flat in a city where I can’t speak the language than here without you, and that is the least complicated feeling I have ever had in my entire life.”

He doesn’t say anything at all.

“So it’s not about me,” I say. “That’s my point. I’ve just taken me off the table, and the question’s still standing there.”

“Penny—”

“You’ve had four hundred years, Julian. You’ve had Nova Scotia and Bristol and a century of being safe and being a guest everywhere else you went. Then you came back here and you sat at the head of a table and let a woman put food in front of you that you couldn’t eat because it meant somebody had made a place for you. You wrote down the name of a child who died in 1809 so it would be somewhere.” I make myself stop and breathe. “This is the only life you have ever actually chosen. Not a life you’ve survived, but a life you’ve chosen. Don’t let one man with a podcast walk into the only place on earth that’s ever been yours and turn you back into a guest in it.”

His face changes, just a little.

“I’m not asking you to stay for me,” I say. “I want you to understand that. I think if I really insisted you’d do it. I think you’d stay for me and call it love and hate every minute of it, and I don’t want that. I want to know whether you think this life is worth defending. I don’t need the answer tonight. But I’d like you to find the answer before the thirty-first, because after that there’ll be shutters and a very dull lawyer in Boston telling everyone you aren’t available.”

The kettle ticks. It boils and thinks about it and boils again.

“I love you,” he says.

“I know.”

“But I have never defended anything, and I have no idea how it is done. I want you to understand that I am not being modest. I have four hundred years of leaving, and I am extremely good at it. I don’t have anything else.”

“Then that’s the answer for tonight,” I say. “It’s an honest one, and I’ll take it.”

He looks at me for a long moment.

“You would come to Lisbon.”

“Don’t do that.”

“I am not doing anything. I am attempting to hold on to it.”

I go over and put my arms around as much of him as I can reach, which is not all of him, and he holds on to me in my grandmother’s kitchen for quite a long time, and neither of us settles anything whatsoever.

He stays, but something has gone out of the evening and neither of us is going to say what.