Page 135 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

Nothing happens.

I want to be clear about that, because I spent three weeks braced for something and there was nothing there to be braced for. On the twenty-ninth of January a website changed. On the thirtieth a man came into my shop and ordered a coffee. And then Black Harbor went back to being Black Harbor with a speed I found frankly insulting.

The Veil stays until the middle of March. Ben Carter films the lighthouse eleven separate times because the light keeps not being right, and shoots the breakwater in a snow squall, and gets, on a Tuesday, four minutes of Wendell Marr on the subject of his grandfather’s ditty bag that Rowan later tells me is the best thing in the whole season.

Lucy helps him with some of it. Quite a lot of it, actually. She says this is because Ben understands lenses and doesn’t make her explain why film is better for some things. I say absolutely nothing about the fact that he has started carrying things for her that she is perfectly capable of carrying herself. I am learning restraint.

Episode four, when it eventually airs, is about the dead.

I don’t hear it until October, and neither does anybody else, but the beginning of it happens in February, because Mabel Libby comes into the Salt & Sage on a Wednesday morning with a folder.

“I have a proposal,” she says.

“No.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“I know you.”

“Then you know I have prepared.”

She puts the folder on the counter.

The week before, Julian had taken me into the hidden room at Blackthorn House and shown me three shelves he’d cleared. Not the journals he’d originally removed and then returned.

There are whole stretches of Julian’s life that happened somewhere else. Years in Nova Scotia and Lisbon and Bristol and a dozen other cities. Decades when the only Black Harbor news he knew came in letters or newspapers, if it came at all. There are other periods when he was here and wrote almost every day, followed by years when he wrote almost nothing because apparently a man can live four hundred years and still go through phases.

But the hidden room contains more than his journals.

There are account books from businesses that haven’t existed in a century. Shipping manifests. Letters. Property records. Old newspapers folded into packets. Church notices. A cooper’s ledger from 1823. A box of correspondence from a family named Adams that Julian bought at an estate sale in 1908 because, according to him, “they were going to burn it.”

There are things he saved because they mattered to him and things he saved because nobody else seemed to think they mattered at all. And now he wants to give some of them away.

“Not the personal journals,” he’d said when he showed me the shelves. “Not yet. There are people in them who still have grandchildren here.”

“Okay.”

“And there are things that are mine.”

“Julian.”

“I’m explaining.”

“I know. I’m agreeing.”

That had stopped him. He’d looked at the shelves again.

“I have spent a very long time assuming that if I didn’t keep something, it would be lost.”

“Sometimes you were right.”

“Yes.” He’d touched one finger to the spine of a small brown book I knew immediately. The one he’d given me at Christmas. The one from 1809.

Mercy Rood.

“You gave me that one.”

“I know.”