Chapter 2
“He’s not coming,” Lucy says. “The letter was a very fancy way of saying no.”
“The letter was a very fancy way of saying yes. ‘I accept with pleasure.’ Those are the words. In ink. I have it framed.”
“You do not.”
“I have it in a drawer in a protective sleeve. That’s basically framed.”
“People write letters. People also stay home.” She’s crouched by the table with her camera, getting the candlelight on the goblets. “I’m managing your expectations, Pen. It’s what I’m for.”
“You’re for carrying things.”
“I contain multitudes.”
It’s quarter to seven and the Salt & Sage smells like duck fat and black garlic and the particular scorched-sugar smell of blood-orange tarts going right, finally, on the fourth tray.
The crimson linen is down. The candles are lit, all forty of them, and the room has gone the color of the inside of a plum.
I have looked at the door eleven times.
“Twelve,” Lucy says, without turning around.
“I hate you.”
“You love me. Look at that door one more time before the guests come and I’m putting it on the internet.”
The Coynes arrive first, because the Coynes always arrive first. Harriet comes in ahead of her sister-in-law with her coat already half off and Dot trotting along in her wake. Harriet’s eyes go straight to the tables.
“Oh, Penny.” She stops dead. “Oh, it’s dreadful. It’s perfect. It looks like a funeral home with money.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me all week.”
“How’s your hip?”
“I’m thirty-two, Harriet.”
“That’s what I said about mine.” She pats my arm on the way past and takes the seat she takes every year, three down on the left, near the fire and a long way from the mayor.
After that they come in a rush, the way they always do.
Theo Goodwin with two bottles under his arm and salt still in his beard from the dock.
The Ellises, bickering pleasantly about a parking space they have been bickering about since 2019.
Doris Alden and her daughter and, asleep over her daughter’s shoulder, her grandson.
Tommy’s nephew is four years old and he was absolutely not invited and I am absolutely delighted to see him.
And Mabel Libby, wearing a brooch shaped like a beetle. Mabel is seventy-five. She ran the library for thirty-one years before the historical society got its hands on her, and she knows more about the people in this town than is strictly legal.
She takes both my hands in the doorway and looks past me at the room.
“You’ve outdone yourself, dear. Now.” Her voice drops about an inch. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Doris told me at the market. You put an invitation through the gate at Blackthorn House.”
“I did.”
“With your own hands.”
“With my own hands.”
Mabel’s eyes go bright in a way that makes me want to check the exits.
“I have been writing to that man since June. Three times. I got three notes back—all very polite, all saying no, all in handwriting I would happily frame.” She squeezes my fingers hard enough to hurt. “And you got him with a soup.”
“He hasn’t come yet.”
“He will,” Mabel says, with the flat confidence of a woman who has been right about this town for fifty years, and goes to find her seat.
By half past seven the room is loud. Twenty-three people, four bottles down, and the mayor has already told the story about the lobster boat and the wedding cake, which is a good story and which he has now told in this building three years running.
Harriet is explaining her second husband to somebody who did not ask.
Her first husband was a werewolf and the least said about that the better.
Somewhere under the table, a child who is meant to be asleep upstairs is systematically working his way through a bowl of candied orange peel.
“Penny.” Theo is at my elbow with a bottle in each hand, all barrel chest and salt-and-pepper beard and a flannel shirt he has tucked in as a concession to formality. “Where do you want these?”
“On the bar. Thank you.”
“You’ve got a face on.”
“I have a normal face.”
“You’ve got the face you had the year the oven died.” He looks down the table, finds the gap, and understands it immediately, because Theo Goodwin is the least complicated man in Maine and misses absolutely nothing. “Ah.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said ah.”
“That’s not a word,” Theo says. “That’s a noise.
You can’t hold a noise against a man.” He takes his bottles off to the bar end, and I go back to the kitchen and plate twenty-four first courses, because I set twenty-four places whether he comes or not, and if that’s stubbornness then I’ve been called worse things by better people.
I’m carrying the first six goblets out, the steaming Widow’s Broth a gorgeous deep red that Lucy has already photographed twice, when the room stops.
I don’t hear it, exactly. I feel it. A cool draft off the harbor slides across the floor and touches my ankles, and the sound of the room changes.
A wave of silence sweeps across the room, conversations trailing off mid-sentence like someone’s turning a dial down, until the only thing left is the small hiss of the candles and Theo saying “—and I told him, that’s not a lobster, that’s a—” before even Theo runs out of words.
Julian Volkov fills my doorway.
I got him wrong. Completely wrong. In my head a mysterious man in a haunted house was going to be thin—reedy, pale, wax-museum elegant, some cobwebbed aristocrat who’d blow over in the harbor wind.
This man is broad. He's tall enough that he tilts his head a fraction coming in, and his shoulders brush the frame on the way through. His dark coat was very obviously made for exactly those shoulders and no others. He moves like the floor’s been expecting him.
Dark hair, nearly black, a little longer than the men around here wear it, with a wave in it he clearly can’t be bothered to fight.
A face that has no business existing on a Tuesday in Maine—high cheekbones, a straight nose, a hard clean jaw, and a mouth that I look at exactly once and then have to consciously stop looking at.
Pale skin. Not sick-pale, but the kind of pale that makes the candlelight seem to like him more than it likes the rest of us.
He’s the best-dressed thing to walk into this town since the lighthouse got its centennial plaque.
“Good evening,” Julian says.
His voice does something to the room. It’s low and unhurried and there’s an accent in it I can’t place, the kind of accent that’s been sanded down by a lot of years somewhere else.
Every head turns to me, because I’m the host, because this is my party, because it’s my job now to walk over there and welcome the mysterious man I personally shoved an invitation at through a cold brass slot.
I’ve hosted hundreds of these parties. I could welcome a guest in my sleep. I have literally welcomed a guest while asleep on my feet at 2 a.m. after a wedding.
I open my mouth.
“Mr. Volkov,” I say. “Hi. You came. Through the door. Welcome. To it. The party.”
The party. To it. The door.
“Oh my God,” Lucy mutters.
Julian’s gaze moves unhurriedly over the room, taking in the candles, the linen, the goblets, and the twenty-three staring faces. Then it settles on me, and something at the corner of that unfair mouth moves. Not a smile, but the idea of one. The rough draft.
“You invited me.”
I put down the soup. I put down all six goblets, in a row, without spilling any of them, and I intend to be proud of that for the rest of my life.
“Let me take your coat.”
He gives it to me, and the wool is cold, the way a coat is after a long walk. The road up to Blackthorn is two miles of bad gravel and there is no car in my lot. And when his hand passes near mine I feel the cold come off him too, like standing next to a window in January.
“It’s freezing out,” I say. “Did you walk?”
“I like the air.”
“You walked from Blackthorn?”
“It is not far.” One side of his mouth lifts half an inch. “You are holding my coat as though it has done something wrong.”
“Sorry. It’s a very good coat.” I hang it up. “Come and sit down. You’re at the head of that table, next to Mabel, and I should warn you—”
“Mabel Libby,” he says. “Yes.”
I stop with my hand still on the hook. “You know Mabel?”
“I know her letters.”
And then he smiles properly, for about a second and a half, and I forget every single thing I was going to say next.
Mabel, bless her ancient interfering heart, rises out of her seat with the smooth authority of a woman who has broken up thirty-one years of teenage necking in library stacks. “Mr. Volkov. Mabel Libby. Come and sit. Theo, move your elbows, the man needs a chair he fits in.”
And just like that the spell breaks. The room exhales and finds its voice again, and Julian crosses my dining room to the head of my table. I return to the stove with the dawning, awful realization that I have been completely incoherent with the most beautiful man I have ever seen.
Lucy appears at my shoulder. “‘Through the door,’” she whispers. “‘Welcome. To it.’”
“Shut up.”
“Take these out or I’ll put you in the soup.”
I plate the rest of the soup with hands that are not entirely steady, and I tell myself it’s the heat off the pan.
Here’s the thing about my parties—I know how they’re supposed to go.
I built the machine. I know exactly when to bring the next course, exactly when to top up the wine, exactly when to lean in and give the shy guest an opening and when to leave the loud one alone.
I run this room the way Theo runs his bar and Mabel ran her library.
It’s mine. I’m good at it. It’s the one place on earth where I always, always know what to do.
So it is genuinely disorienting to spend the next hour of my own dinner party sneaking looks at the man at the head of my second table. Some of that is the face. Obviously. But the longer I watch him, the more interesting the rest of him gets.