And that’s it, enough of a reprieve. I press the gas pedal hard, and the car jolts forward, warm Coke spilling in my lap, buttered popcorn tumbling like confetti over the upholstery. Bee adjusts the rearview mirror, watching Michael wave goodbye behind us.

“He’s cute,” she says as we turn onto the state highway.

“I didn’t notice,” I say, and though it’s a lie, she doesn’t call me on it. We head home, one taillight burned out and Dracula whispering on the wind. He’s laughing, too. He always has a good chuckle when he gets to see me acting like him.

The house is waiting sullenly for us, dark as always and colder too.

“Don’t worry, Lucy,” Bee says as we cross into the parlor. “It’ll all work out. It always does.”

Smiling, I pretend to believe her as I open the drawer on the rolltop desk in the corner. An unlit candle in my hand, I’m looking for a matchbook, but there are other things in here too. Things I’d rather forget.

A silver letter opener, a gift from Mina that’s no longer safe for me to touch.

A pot of nearly dried ink and withered paper, for letters we never write.

And a single antique necklace strung with rubies the color of fresh pomegranate seeds. The last of my long-ago dowry. Bee and I have almost no money to our names, but that doesn’t matter. We keep this in case we need to run. In case these men force us to run.

That was how we got here in the first place. We’d never wanted to leave England, but we didn’t have much choice. The war came, and then another, and we couldn’t stay. Especially not when Rochester was closing in on us. He tracked us to London in the middle of the Blitz, and I wasn’t sure what scared us more: the hellfire of bombs or him.

“He’ll never stop,” Bee had whispered as we cowered in the dank basement of the semidetached house we were renting in Blackheath.

It was Bee who chose Hollywood, pointing to it on a map.

“We can hide there. We can be anyone we want,” she’d said, and she was right. In the blink of an eye we became California girls, even shedding our accents, anything to blend in. It’s easy to play make-believe in a city cobbled together from it.