The kitchen was exactly the same. She half expected to find Matthieu at the oven--- but of course, he was not there. As that disappointment set in, she started to notice other things, other signs that this kitchen was not her kitchen. The appearance might be the same, but the room was bereft of smells, the air stale. It was had not been used cooked in for some time.

  Her hand twitched to explore the cabinets and ice box --- the only obvious difference --- but she resisted the temptation. There was no point. There would be nothing in them. She could hear Matthieu in the back of her mind asking one of his many rhetorical questions during their lessons, “What do vampires have to do with food during such a time of need?”

  Nothing. Theodora said once that starvation was the worst was to watch someone die.

  She moved through the kitchen, trying not to see the ghosts of her future as she went.

  Oliver moved with her; their hands still intertwined. Together they took the backstairs like she always did – or like she will do. Being at Saint-Tourre distorted her sense of self. Was she trapped in her own footsteps? Doomed to retread the same path over and over again?

  On the walls of the stairwell were the same painting she will grow up with, thought the photos are not the same. There are only a handful of black and white pictures: one of the three of them. It was blurry, but Jacques’ head was thrown back in laughter, her grandparents grinning for the camera. The rest were landscapes.

  The main hall in the family quarters was the same. Running away from the memories, she pulled Oliver after her, resisting the urge to peek into her family’s rooms, to snatch away from personal connection. It was bad enough that she was here to steal books.

  They went to the Archive first, where the older material was kept. She didn’t expect to find much, if anything, there. Most of the records were legal or administrative. There were the stray letters or diaries, but families preferred to on to those. Besides, neither became common practice until the seventeenth century. Those witches could very well still be alive if the numerous wars hadn’t gotten to them. A brief skim of the treatises and Estella confirmed what she already knew: there was nothing in the Archive for her, not even a story.

  However, they time was not wasted. Oliver was intensely curious about the Archive, how it functioned, and the documents it housed.

  He was especially impressed that she could read them. Fighting back a fierce sense of déjà vu, she tried to explain that most of the records in Europe for a long time were recorded in a broad standard tradition set by the Roman church, but he was so caught off guard that she knew Latin that she ended up spending an hour detailing her homeschooling.

  “No wonder you’re so much smarted than I am.”

  “Oliver…” She wanted to chide him, but he was grinning at her with a dramatic hand pressed to his brow, looking at the world like a Victorian lady about to faint.

  “I never stood a chance before such brilliance.”

  Estella rolled her eyes as she walked past him to go to the Library. During their hour of chatting, Estella momentarily was relieved from the pressing depression of being home-not-home. But in the Library, the absence was impossible to ignore.

  As ever, her great grandmother Estella stared down at her from her place above the mantel. Estella always felt that the eyes followed her wherever she moved.

  “You made a horrible mess of things,” she scolded the offensive painting. “You didn’t even get to suffer the consequences for it.” It felt mocking to see her standing there, surrounded by her children. Of what a privilege! To have your family whole and healthy. She never had that for a moment.

  “Is that her? Your name’s sake?”

  Estella didn’t answer, nor did she linger before the portrait any longer. She marched to the stacks like a general going to battle and the catalog was her weapon. It was, like much of this visit, as if she was following in her own footsteps.

  She had perused the catalog mainly out of habit. Even as she read the subject headings and skimmed the titles, the back of her mind played the steps she would take.

  She had, after all, done this exact search less than a year ago. She’d take the same course of actions in eighty-odd years.

  For a moment, the room spun, as if Saint-Tourre itself had trouble differentiating between the threads of time that were knotted around her.

  “Are you ready?”

  Or maybe it was just her. Oliver didn’t appear affected at all.

  The stacks were more disorienting than the Archive. She spent more time here working and reading than any other room in the house. Out of the corner of her eyes, she could just see her family. There was Matthieu at their worktable near the windows. Here was Theodora weaving between the books, adding to their collections, looking for one to read, or perhaps working on Estella’s book list for the next school term. In the quiet, Jacques’s newspapers rustled, drawing her attention to the velvet sofa in the front of the room.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The books were there --- all of them that she had so desperately searched for a lifetime ago. A laugh bubbled hysterically out of her.

  She passed them to Oliver, unable to inspect more than the spine. What did it matter if she didn’t flip through the pages? Clearly, she would keep them.

  Books stored away in their bags, Estella led Oliver out of the Library intending to retrace their steps.

  “What can you tell me about this painting?”

  Caught off guard, Estella turned around to find Oliver ten feet behind her, pointing at a simple landscape. To her, it had always been there with its pastoral slopes and picturesque urban outline in the distance. It was so familiar to her that she barely thought of it as more than background.

  “It’s a recreation of the cityscape of Constantinople, before it was Istanbul.”

  His left check raised slightly as he considered her words. “Why is it here?”

  “Theodora is Greek. She was born to a wealthy family in Constantinople during the Roman Empire.”

  “How did she end up here?”

  “That is literally a long story,” she laughed. “but the gist of it is that she came from a time when the veil between humans the supernatural wasn’t so thick, and to that end, when witches and vampires co-existed more often. Saint-Tourre was essentially a testament to that old life.”

  “And your grandmother for attempting to maintain it. But why France? Why this spot?”

  “Ah. That is because of Matthieu. Or more specifically, his wife.” She didn’t want to say her name, afraid it would invoke another bump road in the road of her life, like a curse her great-grandmother followed her around, in escapable. But Oliver was waiting, expectant for an explanation. His eyes had widened now, eager to listen to her. “The house was built on what used to be her family’s land. It is where they lived, and where they died.”

  Her frowned at her, the corners of his mouth pinching together. Suddenly, his hand shot out and grabbed her forearm, dragging her deeper into the house. “No more about death. Tell me about the living, about your life here in this giant home.”

  Oliver stopped at every door, every piece of décor, wanting to know about it: who it was or what it was or where it was from.

  “What is this horrendous thing?” He came to an abrupt halt before a particularly unpleasant piece of art on the ground floor.

  “A tapestry.” She said, unhelpfully.

  “Yes, but of what? It looks like a blood bath.”

  It was actually a depiction of Persephone leaving Hades for the overworld, but the artist had what she and Jacques theorized an abundance of red thread. The result was less a goddess entering a period of rebirth and more a woman consumed by flames. Matthieu hated it, but it was certainly off-putting, so Theodora put it in a public part of the house.

  Oliver nodded severely after she explained. “A vampire must always be slightly menacing. It is in our contract.”

  She giggled. “Once, I was with Jacques down here and he spilled some red wine --- the man talks with his whole body --- on it. We fled the scene quickly. He didn’t even clean it up! No one noticed.”

  They laughed harder. For every subsequent piece of art Oliver specifically inquired if she and Jacques had assisted in its ruin too.

  Eventually, they made it to the music room, which her grandparents treated as an unofficially archive and justification to keep any kind of instrument that delighted them.

  “Do any of you play an instrument?”

  “Mostly Jacques. And even then, only for a purpose.”

  “Such as…”

  “To terrorize Theodora. Once a year he picks an instrument to learn just enough to harass her. When I was twelve, he learned how to play the French horn and narrated her movements all day.”

  “Isn’t he a lawyer?”

  “A funny lawyer.”

  Oliver grinned. “He sounds like it.”

  She liked talking about her family with him, liked letting him into her personal life this way. It made them feel closer, somehow. Perhaps that’s why she shared another story. “One year, she anticipated him and avoided him all month. I’ve never received so many emails before or since. So, the next year, he bought me a concertina to do a surprise attack. It’s the only instrument I know how to play.”

  Oliver laughed heartedly at her story, and she found herself infected by the sound of it. Felt the warmth and joy and the humor flow into her lie a stream washing away debris. Now laughing with him, they say together on a piano bench, enjoying the moment.

  “Your life sounded happy, even if I don’t know what an email is,” he commented a short while later.

  The description stalled her. It didn’t sound quite right. “I had a good life.”

  “But not happy?”

  The two of them shared so much, she forgot that he didn’t see her before she was on the other side of it. That privilege belonged to his future when they bonded over their melancholy.

  “I never doubted that I was loved and loved in return. Or at the very least that I was cared for. I’ve been very fortunate, but I was also always afraid. Afraid of the creatures that wanted me. Going out in public was near constant anxiety. And I was afraid of what the bite would do to me --- trust me, the side effects of the bite weren’t pretty when they started. The process was drawn out over years for me.”

  She thought about that night in Chicago, all those months ago. ‘I’ve actually never felt freer than being out of time.”

  “And despite all of that, you love and miss your family.” He said softly. She wondered, would he appear sad if she looked at him? She kept her eyes on the black and white keys.

  “Desperately.”

  He stood, offering his hand to her as he spoke, “Then Miss de Luca de Saint-Tourre, we better start studying again.”

  Her chest squeezed at the sight of him. She took his offered hand and entwined their fingers.

  They retraced their steps, following the main hallways back to the family quarters. She didn’t have to lean them this way, but her earlier feelings of unease had ceased. The rooms that this morning had made her feel unmoored now anchored her, remined her of the firm ground she was raised on.

  Oliver did that. With his questions and his forcing her to play tour guide, to speak about her family.

  She hadn’t meant for this to happen. To be here in 1939. To find Oliver and he find her. For him to come with her on this journey. For her to fall in love with him. Oh, fine. If she was honest with herself, she knew it was happening during their month together at Saint-Tourre. He was interesting and kind and attentive, and he loved his family. And lost, so lost like her.

  “What is it?”

  She was staring at him, the corners of her mouth turned slightly down. They had an unspoken agreement. Or maybe not an agreement, but certainly an understanding that their… relationship? Involvement? Connection? Wouldn’t be looked in the face. Oliver can flirt, and they can share minor touches, like holding hands, but this wasn’t a relationship they could develop. There was nothing for them at the end of the road, except for a dead end.

  And yet, she ached. Right next to the hole in her chest where her family was, a new pain had taken shape, this time caused by her own hand.

  “Estella?” He was concerned now, stepping close to inspect her.

  I love you. “Thank you.” She said simply.

  He seemed to understand. One side of his mouth tipped up. “I don’t know what you mean.”