Page 127 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Who’s Victoria?”

“A friend of his.”

“Of course there’s a Victoria,” Chloe says faintly.

“When’s it going out?”

“It doesn’t go out until the autumn. But he locks the season in about three weeks and once it’s locked it’s locked, and he’s already told the network.” She rubs her face. “I told him on Monday I wouldn’t produce it. Not the episode—the entire season, if that’s in it. He took it about as well as anybody could take it, which is to say we were both very reasonable and I cried in the car.”

“Chloe.”

“I’m not doing this to be brave, and I don’t want anything. I just think somebody should tell him no in a way he actually has to look at. And it turns out that when you’ve spent six years being the person who finds things, the one thing you haven’t found is what it costs.”

I sit down on the flour tub because it’s closest.

“Why are you telling me?”

Chloe is quiet for long enough that I look up.

“Because you cater the reception and you make the tarts and you turn up at everything,” she says, “and you’re the worst liar I’ve ever met in my life. I watched your face when Rowan said that at the reception. I’ve known since New Year’s, and I’d bet the job I’m about to lose that you’re the reason that man’s still in this town instead of on a plane.” She almost smiles. “I told you because you’re the one who’s going to do something about it. That’s what you do. Anybody in this town could’ve told me that and half of them did.”

She stands and winds her scarf twice around her neck.

“Rowan’s at the Lantern on Tuesdays and Fridays,” she says. “He’ll be there tomorrow. He’ll be there on his own, because Ben’s got the boat thing with your friend, and I’m not currently speaking to him socially.”

Then she goes.

I stand in my shop with the untouched lemon tart and two mugs of tea and the timer going off somewhere behind me. Then I take my apron off and get in the van.

I go up the hill and tell Julian all of it. The photographs. The episode. The two million people and the four thousand who are good at spreadsheets. Chloe refusing to produce the season. I tell him everything because I have learned that deciding what he can bear to know isn’t the same as taking care of him.

And the whole time I’m talking, I’m watching the thing I’ve dreaded since December rise up in him like water in a leaky boat.

He goes still. He goes courteous. He asks me three quiet, precise questions about Chloe’s employment situation, which is his way of caring about her while not talking about himself. Then he goes to the window and looks down at Black Harbor.

“Then I think it must be Lisbon after all.”

“Julian.”

“Not to punish anyone. Simply because it is the version I know how to do.” His back is to me, and his voice is the calmest I’ve ever heard it, which is how I know it’s the worst. “If I close the house now, before the season is locked, he has no present tense. He has four photographs and a locked gate and a man who left. It is a considerably less compelling story.”

“You told me you wanted this life.”

“I do want it.” He turns around. “I have never wanted anything the way I want to sit at the end of your counter on the first of February like a person with a life. And that is precisely why I have to be the one to say the sensible thing, because you can’t, and I can, and one of us must.”

And here’s the thing. I could do the whole speech again. I could stand in his kitchen and take myself off the table and tell him about the copper beech and green Buick and Mabel’s mother, and I have it all prepared. I could give it to him in ninety seconds.

But I don’t.

Because I did that already. On the tenth I stood in my kitchen and told him it was his to decide and I meant it. If I drag him down that hill by the hand it isn’t his choice anymore. It’s mine. Then Lisbon or no Lisbon he’s a guest again, this time in his own life, brought along by a woman with a plan. I’ve spent three months learning the difference between asking a question and answering it for him.

So I do the hardest thing someone with my personality has ever been asked to do.

“Okay,” I say.

He blinks.

“Okay?”