Page 65 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

“She kept this kitchen for eleven years, near the end of the nineteenth century. She was born in Black Harbor. Her mother was French, and the pan belonged to her before it belonged to Marguerite.” His gaze stays on the dull copper. “She retinned it twice that I remember. The repair on the stockpot was hers as well.”

“She was good.”

“She was very good.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died here,” he says. “In a room on the third floor. Of nothing in particular. Of being old, which is the one thing I have never been able to buy anyone out of.”

Julian looks at the confiture pan.

“I have watched a great many people put things away, Penny. That’s another part the books leave out. It isn’t the blood. It’s the pans.”

My throat tightens.

“You learn how a person puts something away,” he says. “You learn that Marguerite always hung the fish kettle from the second hook because she disliked reaching for the first. You learn that someone else folds towels in thirds and another insists the good knives belong in a drawer even though they do not. And then one day the pan is still here and the person is not.”

He runs one thumb slowly over the edge of the table.

“It happens again. And again. Eventually you begin to understand that the sensible thing is to stop learning how people put things away.”

“That’s why you stopped using the kitchen.”

“Yes.”

I look around at the wide empty counters, the old cabinets, the range that could feed thirty people and probably hasn’t fed one in years. When I first saw this room, I thought it was the loneliest kitchen I had ever seen. I was right.

“That’s why the house is like this,” I say. “You didn’t decorate it. You just never took anything down.”

“No,” he says. “I never take anything down.”

“And you stopped coming to the kitchen.”

“I stopped coming to a great many rooms.” He meets my eyes. “And then a woman I had never met walked up to my gate with an invitation on cream card stock to something called a Transylvanian Twilight Feast.”

“Oh God. You heard me talking to the mail slot.”

“Yes.”

“That should have discouraged you.”

“It did. I stood in this house and very nearly did not pick it up, because I knew—I knew, Penny—exactly what would happen if I did. I have four hundred years of knowing that. And then I picked it up anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d hand-delivered it,” he says simply. “Everyone else sends things through the mail. Invitations. Requests. Appeals. Most of them are perfectly well meant. I send money. I decline. The transaction is completed. You climbed a hill most of the town believes is haunted to bring the card yourself. You made a place for me.”

“It was just an invitation.”

“It was a place. No one has made a place at a table for me in a very long time, and you did it before you knew a single true thing about me. And you kept doing it.”

“Were you lonely?” I ask quietly, and he looks at me for a long time.

“Yes.”

That’s all. It’s enough.

“I’m not afraid of you.”