Three Rules

"It's a typo," Liesbeth says.

"The house made a typo."

"The house is two hundred years old and has the spelling of a drunk sailor." She snatches the lease off the counter, folds it in thirds and shoves it into her cardigan pocket. "Forget it. It's nothing. The house writes things. Last spring it wrote more radishes on the bathroom mirror and wouldn't let the water run hot until I planted some."

"Liesbeth."

"Do you want the room or not, Ava?"

You want the room. You want it so badly your teeth ache, which, these days, is a literal thing. "I want the room."

"Then the solstice is seven weeks away and it's not your problem tonight." She grabs your duffel before you can stop her and starts up the stairs. "Come on, lodger. Rules on the way."

The staircase is narrow and steep and turns in a direction stairs shouldn't turn. Pickwick runs ahead of you, tail high. The walls are covered in framed things: pressed flowers, old botanical prints, a needlepoint that says THE KETTLE KNOWS, a photograph of an elderly woman in a straw hat holding a pitchfork like a scepter.

"Oma Griet," Liesbeth says without looking. "My grandmother. She'd have hated you."

"Thanks."

"She hated everyone. It was her love language." She takes the second landing. "Rule one. No biting. Not me, not customers, not the cat, not the ghost who sometimes sits on the third step. I don't care how hungry you are."

"I get blood from the Office. In bags. Like a civilized person."

"Good. Rule two." Third landing. "No sunlight complaints. You chose a house with windows. The sun comes up every day. I will not hear about it."

"I didn't choose to be a vampire."

"And I didn't choose to have a vampire. And yet." She stops at the top, under a slanting ceiling, in front of a small green door that is already open. She turns, and you're one step below her, which puts her mouth level with your eyes. "Rule three."

She doesn't say it right away. Pickwick winds between her ankles. Downstairs, the kettle starts to whistle.

"Don't fall for me," Liesbeth says.

You laugh. You can't help it. "Wow. Okay."

"I'm serious."

"I can see that you're serious. I'm laughing because you're serious." You look at her: the hair, the freckles, the face that should come with a warning label. "Does that happen to a lot of your tenants?"

"I've never had a tenant." Something shuts behind her eyes, quick as a shutter. "It happens to a lot of people. Don't be a lot of people."

She puts the duffel down inside the green door and leaves before you can answer.

The room is perfect.

It's small, with a sloping ceiling and no windows at all, just old plaster painted the color of cream, a brass bed with a quilt, a dresser, and a lamp shaped like a mushroom. Someone has hung thick velvet curtains over the place where a window used to be, purely for decoration, which feels like a joke the house is making. It smells like cedar and dried roses.

You sit on the bed and, for the first time in eight days, you don't feel like you're going to fall through the floor.

Then, because you are who you are, you go downstairs to bake.

The Crooked Kettle closes at midnight; the shop's little kitchen is behind a bead curtain. Liesbeth is wiping down the counter. She watches you tie on your apron with the look of a woman watching a dog try to open a door.

"You're baking," she says. "Now. At one in the morning."

"I'm a baker. One in the morning is when we bake." You're already pulling flour from your duffel, the good stuff, your starter in its jar. "Focaccia. It's my signature. Rosemary, flaky salt, roasted—"

You stop.

You've uncapped the little jar of roasted garlic confit you've been carrying around like a security blanket, and the smell hits you, and your throat closes.

Hives erupt up both arms in a race. You sneeze so hard you see stars. Your eyes stream. Somewhere very far away Liesbeth says a word that is definitely not in English, and then the jar is out of your hand and out the back door and you're bent over the sink, gasping.

"You absolute menace," Liesbeth says, pounding your back. "You brought garlic into my kitchen? You're allergic to it now, you're a vampire, that's the first page of the pamphlet."

"I didn't read the pamphlet," you wheeze.

"Of course you didn't." She shoves a glass of water at you. Then she stands there with her hands on her hips, looking at the flour, the jar of starter, the rosemary. Her face does something complicated.

"Sit down," she says.

She goes through the bead curtain into the shop. You hear jars opening. When she comes back she's carrying a squat black teapot and a single cup, and she pours something dark that smells like smoke and orange peel and very faintly of cinnamon.

"Drink it."

"What is it?"

"Don't ask questions. If I tell you, you'll thank me, and if you thank me I'll start charging you."

You drink it. It's hot all the way down.

Then she sets something in front of you on a saucer: a croissant, a day old, from the shop's pastry case. Not yours. A grocery-store croissant, honestly, flattened on one side.

"Eat that," she says.

"I can't taste food anymore. Everything tastes like cardboard. Everything except—" You don't finish. Except blood.

"Eat it, Ava."

You take a bite.

Butter. Salt. The faint sour of the dough. A layer slightly underbaked, which you'd normally complain about, which right now is the most beautiful thing that has ever happened inside your mouth.

You make a sound. A pathetic sound. Then you are crying, actually crying, over a grocery-store croissant, at a sloped kitchen table in a witch's house, with flour on your wrists.

Liesbeth doesn't say anything. She just sits down across from you and slides the napkin holder closer.

"Tasting Tea," she says finally, very quietly. "My grandmother's recipe. Lasts about an hour. Don't get used to it."

You look up. She's looking at you like you're something she wasn't expecting to find in her kitchen, and isn't sure where to put.

Then she stands up abruptly. "It's almost six. Sun's at 7:14. Go to bed."

You go up at 6:40, full of croissant, flour in your hair.

The velvet curtains are gone.

Not the real windows, which don't exist. The curtains. The decorative ones. And where they were, there is now a window, an actual window, small and round, facing east, and the sky behind it is already going the color of weak tea.

You back out of the room so fast you hit the banister.

"Liesbeth!"

She's on the landing below in seconds, in a sleep shirt and the cardigan, hair falling down. She sees the window. She says, "Oh, you rotten house," to the ceiling, grabs your wrist, and drags you down one flight and through a door you haven't seen.

It's dark inside. Heavy curtains, a big unmade bed, the smell of her shampoo and lavender. She shuts the door hard behind you both and puts her back against it, breathing fast. Your wrist is still in her hand.

Neither of you lets go for a second too long.

"It does this," she says. "It plays games. It'll put the window back by tonight. You can sleep here. I'll take the couch."

"I can take the couch."

"It's my house. Don't argue with me while you're on fire."

She lets go. She turns on a lamp with a red scarf over it, and the room goes soft and dim and rosy, and that's when you see it on her nightstand.

A framed photograph. A girl, maybe twenty-two, dark-haired, freckled, laughing at whoever's holding the camera with her whole face. A green scarf around her neck.

A black ribbon tied around the frame, knotted twice.

You reach toward it without thinking.

"Don't touch that," Liesbeth says.

Her voice isn't sharp. It's worse. It's flat and careful, like she's carrying something full to the brim.

"Who is she?"

Liesbeth looks at the photograph for a long moment.

"Nobody," she says. "Not anymore."