“You are doing the right thing,” Padma Taylor whispered into her daughter’s ear before releasing her. She understood what it meant to love someone enough to give up your whole life in exchange for a promise of what it could become.
“Make sure that prenup is as generous as they claim,” Stella murmured to Phoebe as she crossed the threshold. “Just in case. This house is worth a fucking fortune.” Stella could view Phoebe’s decision only through her own frame of reference, which was entirely concerned with glamour, style, and the distinctive cut of Freyja’s vintage red gown.
“This?” Freyja had laughed when Stella admired it, posing for a moment and tilting her flaxen topknot to one side to show the gown and her figure to greater advantage. “Balenciaga. Had it for ages. Now, there was a man who understood how to construct a bodice!”
It was her normally reserved father who had struggled with the farewell, eyes filled with tears, searching hers （so like his, Freyja had noticed earlier in the evening） for signs that her resolution might be wavering. Once her mother and Stella were outside the gates, her father pulled Phoebe away from the front steps where Freyja waited.
“It won’t be long, Dad,” Phoebe said, trying to reassure him. But they both knew that months would pass before she would be allowed to see her family again—for their safety, as well as for her own.
“Are you sure, Phoebe? Absolutely?” her father asked. “There’s still time to reconsider.”
“I’m sure.”
“Be reasonable for a moment,” Edward Taylor said, a note of pleading in his voice. He was familiar with delicate negotiations, and was not above using guilt to tilt matters in his favor. “Why not wait a few more years? There’s no need to rush into such a big decision.”
“I’m not going to change my mind,” Phoebe said, gentle but firm. “This isn’t a matter for the head, Dad, but the heart.”
Now her birth family was gone. Phoebe was left with the de Clermonts’ loyal retainers Charles and Fran?oise, and Freyja—who was her fiancé’s maker’s stepsister, and therefore in vampiric terms a close relation.
In the immediate aftermath of the Taylors’ departure, Phoebe had thanked Charles for the fine dinner, and Fran?oise for taking care of everyone during the party. Then she sat in the salon with Freyja, who was reading her e-mail before responding to it in longhand, writing on creamy cards edged in lavender that she slid into heavy envelopes.
“There is no need to embrace this godforsaken new preference for instant communication,” Freyja explained when Phoebe asked why she didn’t simply hit reply like everyone else. “You will soon discover, Phoebe dearest, that speed is not something that a vampire requires. It’s very human and vulgar to rush about as though time were in short supply.”
After putting in a courteous hour with Marcus’s aunt, Phoebe felt she had done her bit.
“I think I’ll go upstairs,” Phoebe said, feigning a yawn. In truth, sleep was the furthest thing from her mind.
“Give Marcus my love.” Freyja licked the adhesive on the envelope with delicate laps of her tongue before sealing it shut.
“How do you—” Phoebe looked at Freyja, astonished. “I mean, what are you—”
“This is my house. I know everything that happens in it.” Freyja stuck a stamp on the corner of the envelope, making sure it was properly aligned with the edges. “I know, for instance, that Stella brought three of those horrible little phones here tonight in her bag, and that you removed them when you went to the toilet. I presume you hid them in your room. Not among your underclothes—you are too original for that, aren’t you, Phoebe?—nor under the mattress. No. I think they are in the canister of bath salts on the window ledge. Or inside your shoes—those rubber-soled ones that you wear on walks. Or perhaps they are on top of the armoire in the blue-and-white plastic sack you saved from your trip to the grocer on Wednesday?”
Freyja’s third guess was correct, right down to the plastic bag that still smelled vaguely of the garlic Charles had used in his triumphant bouillabaisse. Phoebe had known Marcus’s plan to flout the rules and stay in touch was not a good idea.
“You are breaking your agreements,” Freyja said matter-of-factly. “But you are a grown woman, with free will, capable of making your own decisions.”
Technically, Marcus and Phoebe were forbidden to speak to each other until she had been a vampire for ninety days. They had wondered how they might bend this rule. Sadly, Freyja’s only phone was located in the entrance hall, where everyone could hear your conversations. It seldom worked properly, in any case. Every now and again it gave a tinny ring, the force of the bells inside the ancient device so strong that they rocked the handset in its brass cradle. As soon as you picked up the receiver, the line usually went dead. Freyja wrote it off to a bad wiring job courtesy of a member of Hitler’s inner circle during the last war; she was not interested in fixing it.