He chuckled at that. “Must be some lingering feminine influence from a past life. If you ever catch me watching The View, go ahead and kill me. I just figured you might come back, and I wanted to make you feel really guilty.”

“Don’t worry, I do,” I said, reaching into the bag. It was plastic, stamped with the logo of a local grocery chain. I froze when my fingers closed on a familiar object. “Nathan… what?”

With trembling hands, I pulled out the small framed photo of me and my parents on graduation day. It had been on my dresser when I’d last seen it. “Oh, thank you.”

Appalled at the sight of my fresh tears, he backed away. “Whoa, whoa. I thought you were going to stop doing that.”

“I’m sorry. Nobody’s ever done anything so nice for me.” It wasn’t a lie. I’d been raised to believe that nothing came easy, nothing was free, and the only person I could depend on was myself. I reached into the bag again. “Is this my…this is my diploma.”

“I figured you might want to keep it, for nostalgic purposes.” He scuffed his shoes on the carpet. “You know, this fire might be the perfect way to break ties with your former life. People die in fires all the time.”

Former life. My photo album. My journals. Everything I’d valued as irreplaceable was gone. My father used to say our society puts too much value on the past. I wished I could scream his words back at him now. My past was all that was left of you. Now that it’s gone, so are you.

“Let’s not talk about this right now, okay?” I said as I dabbed my eyes on the back of my hand. Before Nathan could protest, my stomach growled loudly.

A look of concern crossed his face. “How long has it been since you’ve fed?”

I cringed at the memory of the dead girl. “Cyrus offered, but I couldn’t…feed. Not the way he did.”

Nathan’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. He headed to the kitchen, and I followed.

“So, did you get The Sanguinarius back?” I watched as he pulled a bag of blood from the refrigerator and poured it into the teapot on the stove.

He shook his head. “I didn’t have time to look for it.”

Surprisingly, I found myself savoring the metallic smell of the warming blood. “But you had time to look for my diploma, and the picture of my parents?”

Shrugging his shoulders, he poured me a mug and left the rest on the stove. “I had priorities.”

Why was I a priority? Nathan had only known me a handful of days. “Your priority should have been getting the book.”

He turned to the sink and began halfheartedly washing the dishes. “The book can be replaced. Memories can’t. I know if I lost all those pictures I have of Ziggy… See, one time, when he was eleven, I took him to Disney World. We could only go out at night, of course, but we went in December, so the sun set earlier—”