Page 141 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Please.”

“I’m afraid that you’ll say yes now, and I don’t want you to.”

I turn my head.

“I’ve watched people be trapped by a decision somebody else made about their life. I’ve never been able to stand it.” He pauses. “I want you to think about it for as long as you want and then decide. I don’t want you to make that decision because I just planted a tree.”

The light goes off the water down at the bottom of the bluff.

“So we’re agreed,” I say.

“It appears we are agreed.”

“That’s annoying. I had more.”

“You may still have it.”

“No, it’s gone. You’ve taken all the good parts.”

His mouth curves, and I lean into his shoulder.

“Then here’s what I’m thinking. I don’t know what I’m going to want at sixty. I don’t know what you’re going to want in two hundred years, either, and neither do you, and Victoria clearly thinks you’ll be insufferable about it.”

“Victoria has thought that since 1830.”

“But I know what I want tomorrow,” I say. “And I know what I want in September, and I know that I want to do the Ellises’ fiftieth in ten years and I want you to carry the tables. And I’ve stopped counting down. That’s changed, and it changed in January, and I don’t think you know it happened.”

“I know it happened.”

“You do?”

“You were watching me carry a barrel,” says Julian, “and I looked at you, and you weren’t doing arithmetic. You’d been doing the arithmetic since the twenty-second of December.” He turns his hand over on his knee so I can put mine in it. “I noticed on the twenty-third of February at approximately half past nine, and I’ve thought about it ever since.”

I put my head on his arm.

“The oak’s going to look ridiculous next to the beech for about sixty years.”

“Yes.”

“Arthur says you’ve planted it too deep.”

“Arthur is wrong and I intend to prove it slowly.”

“How slowly?”

“About thirty years,” says Julian. “He won’t be here. That’s the flaw in the plan and I haven’t worked out what to do about it.”

I laugh, and then I don’t. Because he said it without stopping. He said thirty years in the middle of a joke, in an ordinary voice, about a tree. He knows Arthur will be gone. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. He doesn’t go still or put the future away because there is grief waiting somewhere inside it. He just keeps going.

I have spent six months watching this man arrive at every future by way of a loss. He just walked straight past this one.

“Julian.”

“Mm.”

“Nothing,” I say. “There’s shortbread in the van.”

He goes and gets it, and we sit on a wall in the dark with our backs to a house that doesn’t look quite so lonely anymore. There are lights on in about nine windows because Julian keeps forgetting to turn things off now, which I consider progress even though he considers it wasteful, and we eat shortbread.