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“Say it again.”

“I’m not saying it in a hospital.”

“Where would you like to say it?”

I thought about it. I really did.

“Somewhere with daylight,” I said slowly. “Somewhere with coffee. Somewhere I’ve had a shower and a bad night and a good night. Somewhere I’m not scared, or hurt, or crying.” My eyes stung. “I want to say it when I’m sure it’s me.”

His face went very soft.

“You did say it in daylight,” he murmured. “You said I might ask you then.”

“I did.”

“Is it daylight?”

I looked at the window. The sun had come up over the parking lot. It lay across the blanket in a thin gold stripe, and touched his hand, and mine.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think it is.”

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me, and waited, and I felt the whole room hold its breath.

“Not here,” I said hoarsely. “But soon. Take me home.”

Chapter 32

MAKSIM

The Yes

There is a law about the mating bite, older than my mother’s mother, older than the Church, older than the hills of the country where I was born. It says that the bite must be given in the light. Not the sun, necessarily, though the old ones held that the sun was best. The light of a clear mind. The light of a choice made with the eyes open, in the morning, after sleep, when there is nothing left to blame on the dark.

I had not understood, until that Sunday, why it mattered.

Mrs. Pendleton had installed me in the guest room.

She had done it with a firmness that brooked no argument, in the manner of a general moving a battalion. It was on the second floor, at the far end of the east wing, as far from her son’s room as the architecture allowed. A great white bed. A chair upholstered in green silk. A Persian carpet and a fireplace and a window that looked over a lawn my host informed me, at lunch, that no one had walked on since 1994.

“You will sleep here,” said Mrs. Pendleton, “and Lex will sleep there. The other side of the house. With a door. It is a decent household. “

“Mom,” said Lex, from across the table, “we’re grown men.”

“You’re my son under my roof, and I will have decorum.”

“You slapped me in a hospital.”

“That was different. That was a moment. “

I ate my soup, which was very good soup. I have been told that I ate nothing in the presence of humans for a hundred years, and that Mrs. Pendleton found this alarming and therefore made me a bowl of everything at every meal. I ate and did not taste, and I did not mind, because I found that I liked the company of a woman who put butter on bread without asking whether I wanted it.

Lex’s father had not come to the table.

He had been called away to a meeting, or so we were told, and I had not yet met him. Jennifer said he had seen the news, and Mrs. Pendleton said he was thinking. When I looked at Lex across the mahogany, he said nothing at all and went pale around the mouth.

“Do not fear,” I said, quietly, when Mrs. Pendleton went to fetch the coffee. “He will come.”

“He’ll come with a lawyer. “