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“All right, his lover,” Jane said. “In my day we didn’t talk about it at all.”

“You also rode around in dogcarts,” Lucy reminded her. “But go on.”

“He was really in love with Ambrose,” said Jane. “To be honest, I never thought he was capable of it.”

“Sounds like Ambrose’s death killed something in him,” Lucy remarked.

“I think you’re right,” Jane agreed. She fell into silence, watching the dreary landscape of upstate New York pass by.

“It made you think about you and Walter, didn’t it?” Lucy said after a few minutes.

“Yes,” Jane admitted. “I wonder if I haven’t been foolish in that regard.”

“Maybe it’s time to take a chance,” said Lucy.

Jane sighed. She had been thinking the same thing. But still part of her was terribly afraid. After all, her change of heart didn’t change any of the realities of the situation. She was still a vampire, and Walter was still human. He was still going to age and die. While she could die at some point, she wouldn’t age, at least not in the same way. It was a situation destined to make one or both of them miserable.

“You know, my father died when he was thirty-two,” Lucy said.

Jane turned to her. “But I’ve met him,” she said. “When they visited last year.”

“Jim is my stepfather,” Lucy said. “I call him Dad, but he isn’t, at least not biologically. He and my mother have been married since I was eleven. My father died from brain cancer. It was horrible, especially for my mother.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Jane said.

“She loved him more than anything in the world,” Lucy continued. “When he died, she could have just fallen apart. But she didn’t. She held on to all of the good memories and threw the rest away.”

Jane understood what Lucy was getting at. Life never offered any guarantees. Anything could happen at any time, and people could be taken from one another without warning. She thought of Walter and Evelyn. But look what that did to him, she reminded herself. He can barely speak about her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

“Suit yourself,” said Lucy. “Spend the next thousand years being lonely.”

“You’re really an impudent young lady, do you know that?” Jane said.

“I’ll tell you another story,” said Lucy, ignoring the reprimand. “When I was on the road with the band, one night in Milwaukee I came out after a gig and saw this dog scrounging through the trash outside the club we were playing at. The bouncer was kicking him to get him to go away. He ran down an alley, and I followed him. He hid under our van and wouldn’t come out. He was terrified. So I got a hamburger from the club and sat there for two hours, coaxing him out. I guess his hunger won out over his fear, because eventually he crawled out and ate.”

“This is a horrible story,” Jane told her.

“It gets worse,” said Lucy. “Well, sort of. The short version is that I talked the other girls into letting him stay. He was an ugly little guy, a mutt. He limped, and his fur was all patchy. I named him Spike. Anyway, when we got to Des Moines I took him to the vet to make sure he was okay. And he wasn’t. It turned out he had a bad heart. The vet said he’d likely been starved as a pup and treated badly. His leg had been broken, which is why he limped.”

Jane glanced back at Jasper, who was still looking out the window, his ears flapping in the breeze. “I don’t think I want to hear the rest of this story,” Jane told Lucy.

“Well, you’re going to,” Lucy said. “Because there’s a point to it. After what happened with my dad, I didn’t think I could handle watching someone I loved die. The other girls wanted me to have Spike put down, or at least leave him at a shelter. And I almost did. But then I looked at his funny little face, and I knew I couldn’t do it. He’d come into my life for a reason. So I kept him.”

She got quiet, and Jane thought perhaps she’d come to the end of the story. That wasn’t so bad after all, she thought, relieved.

“He died three months later,” Lucy said suddenly. There was a hitch in her voice. “We were in Albuquerque.