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He nodded. “I have not been back to where I was born since just before the American Revolutionary War.”
“How old are you, exactly?”
He looked at me for such a long, heavy moment before answering that I began to worry I’d overstepped. Before I could apologize for prying, though, he said, “I am not entirely certain. My memories before I turned in 1734 are... opaque.” He swallowed and looked away. “There was a vampire attack on my village that year. Most of us were either killed or turned. I believe I was in my mid-thirties when it happened.”
1734.
My mind was reeling as it tried to process the fact that the man sitting beside me on the couch was more than three hundred years old.
“And that is precisely why I have not returned in so long,” he continued. “All the people I knew from before I turned are long gone, except for—” He abruptly cut off, as though he’d been about to say more but decided against it at the last minute. He shook his head. “All the people I knew and loved from my childhood are dead.”
The firm set of his jaw told me there was more he wanted to say, but he simply pressed his lips together and looked again at the art notebook spread open before us on the coffee table. For the first time, it occurred to me that it must be incredibly lonely to live forever while everyone around you aged and died.
Maybe this was why he kept Reginald around. Having one constant from his past must be a comfort to him—even if said constant was also kind of an ass.
“What was your hometown like?” I asked.
He’d already shared more about his past in these few minutes than he’d done the entire time I’d known him, and part of me wondered if asking for more was pushing it. But he was still such an enigma, even after all these weeks with him. Now that we were talking about his past, I couldn’t help myself.
If he minded my question, he didn’t act like it.
“I don’t remember much,” he admitted. “I remember feelings. My family, some of my closer friends. Some of the things I liked to eat. I used to love food.” He smiled wistfully. “I remember the house I lived in.”
“What was it like?”
“Small,” he said, chuckling. Looking around his spacious living room, he added, “You could probably fit three of them in this apartment. And there were four of us living there.”
“No McMansions in England three hundred years ago?”
He shook his head, still smiling. “No. Certainly not in thesmall village where I was raised. No one had the money or the resources to build anything bigger than what was absolutely required to keep a family protected from the elements.”
I thought of what little I’d learned of the architecture in eighteenth-century England from my art history classes. I could almost picture Frederick’s little house in my mind’s eye. A thatched roof, possibly. Floors made of simple wood.
How did a boy raised in a place like that end up here—in wealth and splendor, in a fabulous apartment across the ocean—hundreds of years later? The details he’d shared with me only whetted my appetite for more information about him. But he leaned back against the couch cushions then, arms folded across his chest, signaling that he was done sharing for the evening.
I didn’t have to be done talking, though. After sharing with me what he had about his sister, the urge to reciprocate and share something of my own life was too strong to resist.
“I’m glad you had your sister, for a time,” I said gently.
“Me, too.”
“I don’t have any siblings.”
His eyes—which had once again been resting on my opened art notebook—flicked to mine. “You must have been very lonely growing up.”
“I wasn’t.” It was the truth. “My imagination and my friends kept me company.” The onlyrealproblem with having no siblings was there was no one else around to distract my parents from me—and my many failings. But I wasn’t about to complain, given what he’d just shared. My dumb only-child guilt was more than Frederick needed to know.
We sat together in comfortable silence after that. Frederick’s eyes drifted once again to my art notebook, but his gaze was unfocused.
“I would like to hear more about your life, Cassie.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “I wish to know more about you. I wish... I wish to know everything.”
The quiet intensity of his tone shot straight through me. The atmosphere in the room seemed to shift, the nature of what we were to one another suddenly tilted on its axis.
I looked at my notebook, which had suddenly become the only safe place in the room for either of us to rest our eyes.
THIRTEEN
Mr. Frederick J. Fitzwilliam’s Google Search History
