Lucy’s hand slips into mine. ‘My grandpa was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I was a teenager. The nurses were brilliant. They taught me and Nana how to talk to him– how to help him communicate. But he had a heart attack before it could get really bad.’ There’s a flinch in her expression, old pain worn into the lines in her face.
‘It must be scary for her,’ she says, ‘not remembering.’
My heart squeezes. ‘Yeah.’
‘And scary for you, too, losing her so slowly.’
‘Yeah,’ I mutter again, my voice catching in my throat. Because that’s exactly it. With my dad, it was brutal, but pancreatic cancer is fast. He was there, and then a few weeks later he wasn’t. But Gilly’s fading from me piece by piece, a memory at a time, and it’s heartbreaking.
What good will eternity be when the people I love are gone?
Lucy’s hand squeezes mine gently, her voice like a balm on my soul. ‘She calls you Liam.’
There’s something close to a smile on my face when I nod. ‘Everyone did, when I was a kid. Bram came later, when I went to the dark side.’ I gesture to my outfit with a hoarse chuckle. When I look at her, her face is serious, and focused on me. ‘No one calls me Liam now, except her.’
‘She remembers the before.’
I nod. ‘She does.’
Lucy’s breath out is soft, and there’s a world of understanding in her expression. ‘You’re kind of difficult to forget,’ she says gently, and everything about it– her words, the way she’s holding my hand, the careful smile on her face– makes me unable to stop myself from pulling her into my arms.
‘Thank you, Lucy Partridge,’ I mutter into her hair, tightening the grip of my arms around her like she’s my lifeline.
‘You’re welcome, Liam Bramwell,’ she whispers back, and for some reason, hearing her say my full name doesn’t make my skin crawl like it usually does.
It makes me feel like I’m coming home.
Chapter Twenty-One
LUCY
It’s no good.
I’ve been trying to write this damn article for over an hour now, and I haven’t made it over two hundred words yet without backspacing the entire thing and starting again from scratch. I think I’m on the sixth incarnation now, and there’s still a bad taste in my mouth when I read it back to myself. I mean, I’ve never been completely on board with the idea of upping the scandal, but I wanted to do it for Jon. To impress him. But that was before the whole kissing-a-married-woman episode. Before any of the absolute rollercoaster of yesterday, in fact.
It feels like a different life now.
I’d notice you in every life.
Guilt floods my chest as I think about Bram.
Bram, who took his mother a pebble from the beach to help her remember.
Bram, who kissed me like I was the only girl on earth.
Bram, who deserves better than me using his past indiscretions and undeserved reputation to sell a few papers.
Shit.
There’s a reason I usually stick to the fluff– I’m not cut out for this. I get my kicks from building people up, not tearing them down. I delete every word I’ve just written, close the document I’ve been keeping my rough notes in, and slam my laptop closed in frustration, pulling my notebook towards me and turning to a clean page. I mean to make notes for the story, but what I actually find myself doing is thinking about Bram.
Because, and I feel silly even thinking it, I have a theory about him. A theory that he might not be entirely what I thought he was. That he might not be entirelyhuman.
I’ve had a strange feeling about him from the start, and the more I learn, the more I wonder if there might be something behind that. I think of Mina telling me the hideous stone thing would not be the last vampire I came across this weekend. Of Peggy warning me that there are vampires all over this town. Could they have been trying to tell me something?
There’s definitely something about Bram, but could that something be that he’sactuallya vampire?
I know it sounds crazy, and I’m sure I’m probably imagining it, but there are certain things about him that I can’t fully explain. Things which, all added up, seem to point to a certain conclusion.