“Because you don’t! Because…” Graham paused, taking a deep breath, before he said, “Because I love you. I love you so much it’s stupid. I was planning to spend the rest of my life with you when I thought you were human, and I’m still planning to spend the rest of my life with you now. I didn’t stop loving you when your skin started falling off, or when you started drinking blood, so it would be a little weird for me to stop now. But if you’d never come here, I would never have loved you. You can see that, can’t you? Maybe I would have met Anastasia and maybe I wouldn’t have, maybe I would have fallen in love with someone else or maybe I would have been alone forever, wondering who the hell I thought I was waiting for, but it wouldn’t have been you. And if it hadn’t been you, there’s no way I would have been sitting here, ready to support an alien invasion of my home planet. I would have been…” He stopped.

“You would have been on the right side,” I finished dully, climbing off the bed. “You would have been one of the scientists working to figure out how to kill us all before we could hurt your world.”

“Can you blame me?” he asked. “This is my home planet.”

“It’s my home planet too.” I shook my head. “You can still leave, you know. You can go and … and find the think tank that’s figuring out how to defeat us. I’m sure they’d be thrilled to see you. You have so much to share with them.”

“That’s the problem!” he shouted.

The room froze. If I had thought that it was quiet before, that was nothing compared to the silence that fell in the wake of his cry. I stared at him. He stared back, chest heaving, cheeks flushed.

“I can’t go find the scientists, and I can’t tell them how to defeat you, because God, Stasia, I don’t want to help you destroy the planet, but I’m not going to betray you. There has to be a better way. There has to be a way we can convince your people not to do this. To leave us alone, or better yet, to be our friends.” He raked a hand through his hair, leaving it in disarray as he stared at me pleadingly. “We’re not alone in the universe anymore. You’re out there. Your people are out there. And you … you’re one of the most amazing women I’ve ever known. I love you. There has to be a way we can work together. Imagine what we could do if we worked together.”

I was still staring at him, trying to formulate an answer, when the door slammed open, spilling Mandy, Lucas, and David back into the room. I had a split second to register the smell of smoke and the sound of sirens before a much more urgent scent washed all of that away.