Page 24 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“That yellow house was blue,” he says, pointing to the left side of the picture. “It stayed blue until the eighties. The eighteen eighties. And there was a wharf there, past the edge of the frame, on the north side. It is not in the painting because it burned in the winter of 1806 and they never rebuilt it.”

I turn my head.

“You found it. The wharf. In Pratt’s journal.”

“I did.”

“What happened to it?”

“Two men were drying nets over a brazier,” he says. “In a shed in February. Which tells you everything you will ever need to know about the men of this town.”

I laugh, and then I stop because of how he said it. Not the words—the words were fine. But there was none of the hesitation a person builds around a fact they got out of a book. He said it the way Wendell says things about 1978. He said it like a man who had been annoyed about it.

The room is very quiet. The fire is doing something small in the grate.

He was there.

The thought arrives with enough certainty that I don’t immediately dismiss it. Which is a problem all by itself, and I decide to leave it for another day.

“You know a stupid amount about this town.”

“I read a great deal. There is not a great deal else to do up here.”

“Who else lives here?”

He doesn’t answer for a beat too long.

“No one,” Julian says.

I don’t push. I’m getting horribly good at not pushing. I stand in front of a painting of a two-hundred-year-old harbor with my hands in my coat pockets and let the moment close over. Something in me hurts on his behalf in a way I have no right to at all.

A man alone in a house this size is a lonely man, and everyone in Black Harbor knows that and says it kindly at the post office. But that isn’t quite what I see. What I see is someone who’s been alone so long he’s stopped expecting anything else.

“You could get someone in,” I say instead. “For the kitchen. Just to make it smell like a kitchen.”

“Could I?”

“I know a woman. She’s very reasonable and she talks constantly and she’d bring her own pans.”

“I am aware of her,” Julian says, in a tone that does something to my knees I intend to deny under oath.

He walks me out to the car. The wind’s come up and the light’s going fast, and he stands out in it with his sleeves pushed up like a man standing in a summer breeze.

I look back at the house from the gravel, and I finally realize what’s been bothering me for an hour.

The house doesn’t look like his. My cottage is mine. I bought curtains and I put a stupid blue kettle in it. I did things to it on purpose. But this house hasn’t been decorated. It hasn’t been furnished, exactly. Every room had precisely the furniture it needed and every piece had settled down into the floorboards.

It doesn’t look owned. It looks grown around him, the way a shell is grown around the thing inside it.

“Penny.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you,” Julian says. “For coming up the hill.”

“It was pastry.”

“It was not,” he says, quietly, and I have to get into the car quite quickly after that.