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“Wouldn’t kill you to be more in touch with your emotions,” he fires back with a smile.

“Does it get lonely?” She wraps her hands around the mug. “Being here on your own.”

“God, yeah.” Straight out with an honest answer. “But then a dog gets sick, or a storm blows through and takes out my power, and I forget to be lonely.”

“Why’d you move back?”

“Ran out of places I wanted to see badly enough to get on a plane.” He drops the chair onto four legs. “And you can only take the sunshine for granted for so long before you start feeling bad about who’s paying for it.”

“Who’s paying for—” She stops. Her eyes find mine across the table. “Oh.”

He was twenty-two when he took his Rites. Left Ravenslight a week later and spent the next decade crossing borders in the daylight because my father stayed inside this one. He came back the year I turned fifteen and bought this place. Two years later, we sat around the fire pit in Mom’s yard, and he told me I’d only know if this town was right for me if I left it. I applied to Stanford and didn’t tell anyone for a month.

That was before Dad died and Sebastian ran. When it was my turn in the grove, Carter stood outside all night waiting for me on the other side.

He takes the teapot to the sink.

“Anyway, you should come out in March, when we’re training properly. I’ll give you an interview. Roslyn wrote a piece on our one and only run in the Iditarod seven years ago and spelled my first name with a K.”

“She did it on purpose, didn’t she?”

“She did. I probably deserved it.”

“A vampire in the Iditarod. Quite the advantage.” She narrows her eyes like she’s about to break open a huge conspiracy.

“We came in ninth.”

“Out of how many?”

“Doesn’t matter. Ninth.”

Ellery asks him a dozen more questions, which he happily answers, until somewhere around ten she works out neither of us has mentioned driving home.

“Nikolas Valzera. Did you pack me a bag?”

“There’s a toothbrush in it.”

She looks like she might cry and decides against it, asking Carter about dog food instead.

Not long after, she crashes on the couch with a dog squeezed in beside her. Both of them snoring lightly.

“You can have the dog,” Carter says. “Not the couch. I want the couch back.”

I lean into the doorway watching her.

“She’s good for you.” He rests two bottles of blood in a pot of hot water to warm.

“Yeah, she is.” Unable to hide the heaviness in my chest.

“Is she going to stay?”

“I don’t know.” I pretend the uncertainty isn’t eating me alive. “And I’m not going to ask her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she came here to get away from other people putting demands on her. And I’d be another one.” We sit and he pushes a bottle across the table. “If I ask, she says yes. That’s the problem. She’d say yes and spend the next forty years finding out she only said it for me.”

There are places she’ll want to go that I can’t reach. She shouldn’t have to arrange her life around a line on a map.