Page 60 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“I’ve decided that painting of you at the museum is a great-great-something,” I said when I arrived.

“That would be the simplest explanation,” he agreed, taking the tin of polish out of my hands.

An hour later, I said, “You said forty years doesn’t seem long to you. What does?”

“Longer than that.”

And that was that.

He isn’t going to tell me. I understand it sometime during the second saucepan. He has been alone with this secret for so long that keeping it has become less a choice than a principle. I am so full of tenderness for him and so completely out of patience that I could put my head down on the kitchen table.

The door is in the corner past the cabinet. It’s paneled to match the cabinets, but it’s newer than everything else in the kitchen, with a rubber seal around it, and there’s a faint hum coming off it that I’ve been hearing under our conversation for two hours and filing, helpfully, under old house.

“What’s that?” I ask, standing up with the confiture pan.

“The pantry.”

“That’s a walk-in refrigerator.”

“It is a large pantry.”

“Julian, I have a walk-in. That’s a compressor. I could pick that hum out of a marching band.” I’m already walking towards it, because I am congenitally incapable of not opening a door in a kitchen, and because a professional walk-in in a house where no one cooks is exactly the kind of thing I cannot leave alone. “Do you know what I would do with a walk-in this size? I could hold two events a week. I could⁠—”

“Penny.”

Something in his voice should stop me. It’s the flat one, the enough one, and later I’ll wonder whether some part of me hears it perfectly well and opens the door anyway because I’m tired of being good.

I open the door.

Cold air rolls out over my bare ankles. The light comes on. And there, on clean steel shelves, in neat labeled rows, are bags. Medical bags, the kind with the little tube and the printed label, deep red, stacked with a tidiness that is so completely him that I would know whose refrigerator this was with my eyes shut. Dates. Small handwritten dates in a fountain-pen hand I’ve seen before, on an acceptance note that came to the Salt & Sage in October.

I stand there in the cold with a two-hundred-year-old copper pan in my hands and look at a vampire’s dinner.

Behind me, the house has gone entirely silent. Even the version of silence Julian carries around with him, the one made of no breath and no heartbeat, has deepened into something I can feel between my shoulder blades.

He’s waiting. I can feel him waiting, braced, the way you brace for a slammed door. He’s been waiting for this since the museum. Maybe longer.

I turn around. He hasn’t moved from the wall, but every line of him has changed. He’s gone very still and very upright, and his hands hang open at his sides. He isn’t looking at the refrigerator. He’s looking at me.

I set the pan I’m still carrying down on the cabinet carefully, because it deserves that.

“So that’s why you never eat my garlic bread,” I say.

For a moment nothing happens.

Then Julian closes his eyes. Not the reaction I expected. When he opens them the red is still there, but underneath it is a man who has just set down something he has been carrying up a very long flight of stairs.

“Yes,” he says. “That is why.”

“I made you sit through the black garlic ribs.”

“You did.”

“And the garlic bread. My grandmother’s garlic bread. I brought it out specially. I stood over you like a—oh my God, Julian, I was so proud of that bread.”

“It was a very fine loaf,” he says. “From a distance.”

I make a noise that isn’t quite a laugh and isn’t quite anything, and I put my hand over my mouth, and I sit down on one of the tall stools by the table because my legs have decided independently that this would be a good moment to sit.