Page 140 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“He’s doing it wrong,” says Arthur, contentedly.

“He’s doing it very fast.”

“Fast isn’t right.”

Julian, waist-deep in a hole, says, “Mr. Finch has explained this to me four times.”

“And I’ll explain it again.”

“I have every confidence.”

They put the tree in. It takes them two hours and involves a quantity of arguing that I would characterize as affectionate on one side and resigned on the other, and at half past six Arthur sniffs and says he’ll see us, and goes down the hill. Julian and I stand on the south lawn as the rain finally eases and look at nine feet of oak tree in the wet ground.

“How long?” I ask.

“For what?”

“Till it’s a tree. A proper one. The kind you can’t get your arms around.”

Julian considers it.

“Two hundred years,” he says. “Two hundred and fifty. It will be respectable in eighty.”

And there it is. It arrives the way it always does, which is without warning, on a perfectly ordinary evening in April with mud on my boots.

Two hundred and fifty years.

He has just put a tree in the ground that he intends to watch grow, and there is no version of standing here where I do not do the sum. I don’t say anything, but I don’t have to. The man can hear my heart from the road.

“Ah,” Julian says.

“Don’t.”

“I was not going to say anything.”

“You said ah.”

“I did say ah,” he admits.

I sit down on the low wall at the edge of the lawn, ignoring the fact that my jeans are getting wet. After a moment he comes and sits next to me, which takes some arranging given the length of him, and we look at the small tree.

“I’m not ready,” I say.

“I know.”

“I want to say it, though, because I’ve been putting it together since December and I want you to understand what I’m thinking.” I put my hands in my coat pockets. “I’m not saying no. I want to be very clear about that, because I have watched you file things away and I am not having you file this one. It’s not a no.”

“All right.”

“It’s that I’m thirty-two, and I’ve been in love with you since approximately the third week of October, and I do not trust a single decision I would make about three hundred years while I feel like this.” I look at the side of his face. “In four years I’ll know things I don’t know now. I’ll know whether I still want the shop. I’ll know what it’s like to be with you when it’s boring. And I would like to be allowed to decide it then, and again after that, and again, and to change my mind, and to be a person who is still deciding when I’m sixty.”

Julian is quiet for a moment.

“Victoria told you it’s not a one-time thing.”

“She said it’s a decision you make over and over for a very long time.”

“She was being accurate. She usually is, at the worst possible moment.” He looks at the tree. “Penny, may I tell you what I am actually afraid of? Because it is not what you think, and I’ve been holding on to it since the twenty-second of December and I would rather not hold it any longer.”