Page 53 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“Everyone knew by four. Harriet called my mother’s cousin in Camden about it, and my mother’s cousin in Camden has not spoken to me since the funeral.”

I look in the mirror and sigh. The dress is a problem, and it’s a problem I created for myself. It’s deep red silk with a neckline that always seems to be on the edge of revealing something and a skirt that swirls around me with every step. I wore it once and then hung it at the back of my closet because it makes me look like a woman who has decided something. Apparently I’ve made that decision because I’m going to wear it. It’s the earrings I keep changing.

“They’re fine,” Lucy says. “You’ve changed them three times.”

“The gold ones drag.”

“Then wear the garnets.”

I look down at the little velvet box on my dresser.

The garnets were Gran’s. She wore them to the same three events for forty years, and the backs have gone thin and soft where her fingers went. She would have loved tonight—loudly, publicly, and entirely without shame—and she’d have gotten nine questions into Julian before the coats were off. I put them in for the warmth of having her at the party. The small sorrow comes with them, the way it always does, and I let it.

Lucy watches me in the mirror. For once, she doesn’t say anything about my face.

Then she looks down.

“You’ve shaved your legs for a roof.”

“It’s a fundraiser. It’s civic.”

“It’s for the roof of a building you have never once been inside without a tray in your hands.”

“I’m attending an event, Lucy.”

“You’re attending a man.” She hops off the bed and uses pins and the curling iron to put up my hair in a way I’ve never managed to do myself. “Deirdre Fanning thinks he’s a werewolf, by the way.”

“Deirdre Fanning thinks the mailman’s a werewolf.”

“She does think that. She’s said it twice, at the post office, to the mailman.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he was Presbyterian.”

I laugh so hard I have to hold on to the dresser.

The nervous part isn’t silly, though. That’s what I can’t explain to Lucy, standing behind me with pins between her teeth and her easy certainty about the world. I’ve fed Julian, or at least put food in front of him, multiple times. I’ve kissed him. Repeatedly. I’ve had his hand under my skirt on my prep counter, which Lucy does not know and will not, not tonight, possibly not ever.

But he’s never taken me on a date. Everything meaningful between us has happened in my rooms. My kitchen. My porch. My house. Tonight he’s the one holding the door, and I don’t know the rules on his side of it.

A car pulls up outside at exactly seven. I know that engine now. It’s the low, expensive purr of the black thing he drives, and it stops in front of my cottage the way I imagine everything in Julian’s life stops when he decides it should.

Lucy scrambles to my window. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, no.”

“What?”

“Come look.”

“I’m not going to gawk at my date out my window.”

“Penny. Come look.”

I come look.

Julian is getting out of the car. He’s in a dark suit, and I have seen this man in beautiful clothes for weeks now, in cashmere and tailored coats and shirts that fit him like an accusation, but I have not seen him in this. The suit is black, or so close to black that the difference doesn’t matter, and it’s cut exactly for the body underneath it, which is to say a body that has no business belonging to a man who spends that much time alone with old books.

He shuts the car door. He straightens his cuffs. He looks up at my house.