Ok, this version of myself is a little less financially stable, but I can figure that out. Mina’s already hooked me up with a couple of contacts, and I’ve got a few ideas of my own that I’m going torun past her when I get back to the city. I’m going to stay here for a little while first, though. I’m not quite ready to leave again so soon.
So I might not have any immediate plans, beyond spending as long as I can getting my fill of Bram, but I’ve got a huge tin full of strawberry tarts that I could probably live on for the foreseeable future.
Peggy pressed it into my arms as we left the cottage just now, pulling me into a tight hug and making me promise that I’ll visit again before I go home.
‘You’re just what that boy needs,’ she said quietly into my ear. ‘I knew it the first time I laid eyes on you.’
I hugged her back extra tightly, my whispered thanks catching in my throat.
Wladek, whom I almost didn’t recognise in his maroon cable-knit jumper and faded black jeans, just chuckled, smoothing his greying hair back from his face. ‘Just imagine,’ he said, ‘if wehadfound a spare room somewhere in town. Gerard’s place, perhaps. I’m sure you wouldn’t have been quite so taken with our Bram if he’d smelt like a fishmonger.’
And when Peggy slapped his arm and the two had dissolved into good-natured bickering, that felt comfortable too.
I remember standing outside this cottage on that first night and thinking that it was the exact opposite of my happy place, but that turned out not to be true at all. I found myself here, in a place where I objectively should not have fitted in but have actually never felt more at home.
Mina once told me that this cottage by the sea is her very favourite place in the whole world, and I think it might be mine too– the place where the story started.
The place where I literally ran into someone who changed my life in a single weekend.
I barely even flinch when a rogue wet leaf plops off the stone vampire as I pass it and splats onto my face. It feels almost like a parting gift. I mean, that statue is still the ugliest thing I think I’ve ever seen, but I can’t deny that I’ve grown a little fond of the damn thing now. It’ll always remind me of that night.
The first of many vampires, just like Mina promised.
I turn and take it all in: the now-familiar shape of the cottage, cut into the cliff that looms behind; the endless churn of the sea, stretching out beyond the horizon; and, most importantly of all, the man waiting by his car, one foot propped against the door like he’s got all the time in the world. And, let’s face it, he has.
Maybewehave, the two of us.
Maybe we have the kind of love to last a lifetime.
Epilogue
LUCY
347 years later
The view from this cliff has barely changed in all these years.
Obviously a certain amount of cliff erosion is to be expected, and the wind attacks us from three directions now that the church is little more than ruins, but it doesn’t change the comfort of the place one bit.
It feels so good to be home.
We’ve been away for a while. It was twenty-two years this time, holed up in a little farming village in the Highlands. Elias was right, it turned out. Now and again, to evade suspicion, we’ve had to move away, change the way we look, sometimes even change our names. It hasn’t been too much trouble, though, after the first time. In fact, we’ve become quite the masters of reinvention.
But now we’re back in Whitby, my happy place, and my home for a good portion of the last three and a half centuries. I moved here a couple of months after the weekend I met Bram, into his little cottage on the other side of the bay. We married two yearslater, and two years after that– on our anniversary, actually– I finally convinced a very reluctant Bram to turn me.
It wasn’t a decision I took lightly, but I know in my heart that it was the right one for us. I also know, in my heart, that I will love this man for eternity.
It hasn’t always been easy, of course, but as I’ve learned from the hundreds, perhaps thousands of friends we’ve made and lost over the years, nothing worth having ever is.
Alongside them it feels as if we have lived a hundred lives, but there has been one constant through it all. The marriage vows take on a slightly different meaning when you eliminate thetill death do us partbit and thein sickness and in healthbit, but the essence of it is the same. In the end, it has all come down to this: we have loved each other.
We have loved each other through days, through years, through centuries. Through soaring highs and crashing lows. We have loved each other through each new name, each new home, each new adventure. We have loved each other in grief and in hope, in success and in failure, in our best moments and in our worst.
Through all of it, always, we have loved each other.
It has been as difficult and as simple as that.
Our time together has been vast, but every time we come back to this bench in this graveyard in this town, it feels like it’s been no time at all– like we are still those versions of ourselves who collided in the annexe of Harker Cottage on that dark October night.