Page 12 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I’m broadening myself.”

“You’re staking out a bookshop.” She leans against the counter, the picture of unimpressed patience. “Tell me you’re not looking for him.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re looking for him.”

I am looking for him. For Julian Volkov, who has spent the last three days being almost as much in my head as he was at my dinner table. I keep thinking about the way his shoulders filled my doorway, the careful way he held my grandmother’s glasses, the way he sat at the head of my table and looked at a four-year-old’s toy like it was the most important thing in the room.

I’ve been keeping busy. I’ve rearranged the pantry, which didn’t need it. I’ve cleaned the kitchen, which didn’t need it either. I’ve done three hours of very serious thinking about saffron, because it’s the season for it and I can’t afford it and the Patels want it for the wedding rice anyway. But when Lucy’s not here I let myself drift up the hill in my head and wonder what he’s doing up there, alone in his house with the curtains closed.

I’d like it on record that the bookshop is Mabel’s fault. She dropped it into a conversation the way she drops everything, casually wrapped in something else, so you don’t notice you’ve been handed a live grenade. I saw Mr. Volkov in Harbor Books the other morning, she said on Wednesday, over a display of preserves at the market. In the local history section. He didn’t buy a coffee, of course.

I said mm, like a woman with a full life. Then I went home and could not think about one other thing for four hours, and then I went to the bookshop for a book on lighthouses.

“Gil Amory’s going to think you had a head injury,” Lucy adds.

“Gil doesn’t think about me at all. It’s one of my favorite things about him.”

“Can I say the other thing,” she says, “or is that off limits?”

“There’s no other thing.”

“You dried dishes eighteen inches from a man with his sleeves rolled up and you haven’t been the same since.”

“His forearms, Lucy.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m not proud of it.” I pick up a spatula and put it down again. “I stood at my own sink with a dish towel. Then our fingers touched over a glass and I nearly broke my grandmother’s crystal.”

“Yeah,” she says quietly.

“Yeah.”

“So go and buy a book about bees.”

An hour later, I’m standing in front of the bookshop.

This is not who I am, I tell myself. I’m a grown woman with a business. I cater weddings. People trust me with knives.

I go inside anyway.

Harbor Books always smells like burnt coffee, because Gil Amory has refused to replace that machine since the Clinton administration. It has three small tables, a sagging sofa, and a cat named Ledger, who weighs as much as a sack of potatoes and dislikes every living thing in Black Harbor.

Gil watches me come in for the third day running and says nothing for about forty seconds.

“Bees,” he says finally, raising an eyebrow.

“Bees.”

“Yesterday it was knots.”

“I have very varied interests,” I say with as much dignity as I can muster.

He hands the book over without further comment, but his eyebrows do a lot of work. I take it and turn, with tremendous nonchalance, towards the local history section at the back.

And there he is. My memory had made him smaller.