Page 9 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“You’re better,” Theo says loyally. “Which is exactly what a critic would fear.”

“I am not a critic,” Julian says, and there’s the edge of that not-quite-smile again. “If I were, this town would have four stars and a very small parking problem.”

The table laughs, and I stand there refilling coffee and think, he did it again. Somebody threw him a direct question and it came back as a compliment to Black Harbor, wrapped in a joke. And I still don’t know one true thing about why the man won’t eat.

Which is, I decide, unacceptable. So I go get my grandmother’s garlic bread.

It’s not on the menu. It’s not Transylvanian, unless you count the garlic, but it’s Gran’s garlic bread. The one with the confit garlic mashed into the good butter and the parmesan crust and the thing she did with the rosemary that I did not understand until I was twenty-eight and standing in her kitchen the week before she died. Now I understand it and she doesn’t get to see that I do.

It’s the bread I make when I want somebody to feel held. I don’t make it for parties. I bring it out anyway, warm from the oven and torn, not cut, because that’s how she did it.

I’m three feet away when Julian goes still. Not startled-still. Not polite-still. He goes entirely still, the way a photograph is still, and his head comes up and turns a fraction towards the basket—and then he leans back in his chair and sets his hand over his plate. He leans away from the garlic bread so fast that, for one ridiculous second, my brain supplies vampire. Which is absurd. Not because vampires aren’t real, but because I’m not going to diagnose a man with vampirism over an aversion to carbohydrates.

“Ah,” he says.

“It’s garlic bread.”

“Yes.”

“It’s my grandmother’s.”

“I am certain that it is superb.”

“You haven’t tried it.”

“No,” Julian agrees, and for the first time all night, something moves in his face that isn’t manners.

It’s fast. Half a second, maybe less. But the courtly wall goes down and behind it there’s something I recognize, because I’ve seen it on the Prescott girl and on every person who ever sat at my table pretending they weren’t starving for something that had nothing to do with food. It’s longing. Naked, ancient longing, and it’s aimed at a torn piece of garlic bread in a napkin-lined basket. Then it’s gone, folded back up behind the polite dark eyes so completely that I half wonder if I invented it.

“Your grandmother,” he says quietly, “taught you well.” He takes his hand back. “I wish I could tell you how much I wish I could eat it.”

And that should be another non-answer. It should be more of the same smooth deflection I’ve been chewing on all night. But it isn’t. It’s the truest thing he’s said since he walked through my door. I know it’s true because it costs him something to say it. I can see the cost cross his face like a shadow over water, and I don’t push. For once in my nosy, relentless, question-until-it-makes-sense life, I don’t push.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay?”

“Okay. But I’m leaving it near you. In case.”

The corner of his mouth does the thing. “You are a stubborn woman.”

“You should see me when I’m trying.”

That gets me the real smile again. The whole one. It lasts a second and a half and I feel it in my chest.

What I don’t expect is that he stays. I figured a man who won’t eat leaves the second the coffee’s poured. He makes his excuses, thanks the host, and vanishes back up his gravel road into the dark. That’s the polite version and Julian is nothing if not polite.

He doesn’t leave.

He stays through the coffee and through the mayor’s second telling of the lobster story and through Harriet Coyne falling asleep sitting up and waking herself with her own snoring and blaming the fire. He stays while the Ellises argue their way out the door and while Doris carries her grandson to the car with Horse clutched to his chest and the wooden foreleg sticking out from under a small fist. He stays while the room empties out in that slow, warm, satisfied way a good party ends. He stays while everyone hugs me twice and tells me it was the best one yet, which they say every year, which is the whole point.

And when it’s just Lucy and Mabel and Theo and forty guttering candles and a war zone of a kitchen, Julian Volkov takes off his coat, rolls his sleeves to the elbow, and starts stacking chairs.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say.

“I know.”

“Guests don’t clean up.”