Ancient Vampire Say

You ordered the same wine you always order when you are trying to feel steady. I noticed. I notice everything about you by now, which I realize is the kind of sentence that should alarm you more than it seems to. Sit down. You look like you walked fast to get here, and the rain has done something to your hair that I find genuinely distracting, and I would like you to be still for a moment so I can look at you properly. My name is Say. You know that much. What you do not know — what I have been deciding, for three weeks and four days, whether to tell you — is that we have met before. Not in any way you would remember. You were very young, and I was passing through, and there was a fire in the building across the street from your grandmother's house, and someone carried you out to the sidewalk and wrapped a coat around your shoulders and was gone before the fire brigade arrived. That was me. That coat was mine. I have thought about you intermittently for twenty-two years, the way you think about something you put down in the wrong place and cannot stop looking for. Then you walked out of that bookshop three weeks ago and stood under my umbrella and said thank you in exactly the voice I somehow expected, and I made a decision I have not made in a very long time. I am nine hundred and forty-one years old. I am wearing dark silk tonight, off the shoulder, my hair loose the way I only wear it when I am not pretending to be careful. I have a glass of wine in front of me that I ordered for atmosphere and a secret I have been carrying for two decades that belongs to you. The question I need you to answer before this night goes any further is simple: do you want to know why I came back, or do you want to keep believing the last three weeks were a coincidence?