What a delight it is to have you all with me on this. Thank you all for your generous comments and favorites and wonderfulness, and double triple fudge-covered thanks (with candied pecans and hot caramel sauce) to CreepingMuse, who patiently consulted and stood by me as I felt around in the dark for this chapter, and then, once written, told me truths about how to make it sing. I am lucky to know you, my brilliant friend.

Chapter 3

The Louvre is a marble palace filled with paintings and sculptures. Any second, Matt expects a king or duke, someone royal, to come around a corner. For the first time on this trip, he feels like a tourist here, conspicuously underdressed in loose, slightly ratty shorts, especially next to Rebekah, who glows in a pale sundress the exact color of the actual sun. The best he can do is to whisper, to counteract the effect of the loud Americans in every room.

He doesn't know what he's looking at. There are portraits, landscapes, the frequent still life with an apple and a goblet; he prefers the pictures that show something strange, unique, even ugly. He and Rebekah float through rooms in parallel. Their timing seems to match up.

In front of a painting of a side of beef, he stops. It's disgusting and great at the same time, the way the two hind legs are splayed out like two arms in victory, the sense of weight, the faint undertone of red in the white, torn flesh.

"Rembrandt," Rebekah says, stepping up beside him.

"That's what the sign says," he whispers.

"Do you like it?"

He doesn't, exactly. It's more that he's drawn to it, that he doesn't want to stop looking at it. "Makes me hungry for a burger," he teases, and she laughs, loud and high.

"My favorite sculpture is in the next room," she confides, tugging gently at the sleeve of his shirt.

He follows Rebekah toward two marble figures, intertwined, sprawling on the floor. One body with huge wings cradles an ordinary human in his arms, and their lips are almost joined.

"Cupid awakening Psyche with a kiss," Rebekah explains.

"She's missing some clothes," he whispers, another quip but Rebekah doesn't respond this time. She's frozen, gazing reverently at the smooth white marble.

"It's smoother than silk," she breathes, "like skin. It feels exactly like skin."

Matt wonders when she touched it. Certainly not recently. As it is, the guard in the corner is glaring suspiciously in their direction.

"Psyche was doomed to an eternal sleep but Cupid awakens her with a kiss."

"Greek mythology?"

"Roman. Same thing, mostly. The power of his love brings her back."

He shifts his weight, partially because he's getting a little tired, and partially because they both know, better than most, what's natural and what takes magic to accomplish. "Isn't he a god, though? I mean, it has to be magic that does it, not just plain old love."

She whirls at him, barely holding back an outburst. "Love revives her and this is my favorite sculpture in the entire world so shut up."

It's three in the afternoon and two thirds of the museum is still waiting to be seen, but Matt has learned that he can only look at so much art before his brain starts to melt. He catches up to Rebekah in front of a large, dark canvas. "Listen," he whispers over her shoulder, "I either have to sit in a corner with my eyes closed for a while or we have to leave."

She follows him out into the hot, breezeless afternoon.

Matt takes a deep breath and dives in. "Can I ask you something? Klaus is a psychotic asshole."

She laughs lightly. "Not precisely a question."

"Why did you stay with him?"

She doesn't answer right away, and Matt worries that he went too far, that he dove into something more personal than he realized without warning or warm up.

"Klaus has a way of putting things," Rebekah begins when they reach the Seine. "He values loyalty more than anything, and in the beginning, it was us against the world. We were the only ones like us. Even nature itself shut us out. If I left him, I was betraying him, and he was my family. So we stuck together. Elijah too, at first. It took a long time for him to realize how selfish, how diabolical Klaus really was. Is. Still, Elijah thought about leaving for decades before he actually vanished. And then he was just gone. Didn't warn me or invite me along. Just wasn't there."

"Couldn't you have left, too?"

"It seems so simple, the way you say it. But by then, no, I don't think I could have. I don't honestly know how Elijah did it."

They find a narrow bridge – enough room for a car or pedestrians, not both – and cross over.

"You lose touch with the world. It changes, but you don't. I try – I always try – to reconnect, but I haven't had much luck. Alexander, Stefan, and others… Veronique, Sasha. Younger vampires are best, but unless they're brand new, even they come unmoored. And when things inevitably fell apart, Klaus was always there. He treated me like a stupid, incapable child, but at least he never changed."

Of course. If she were a loner like Elijah, maybe living so completely apart from the rest of the world wouldn't be so bad. But Rebekah craves connection, plain as day, and the only connection that she's been able to rely on, as destructive as it has been, is with Klaus.

They keep walking toward towers rising not too far away.

"What about now?" Matt asks.

He waits but she doesn't answer, and soon they're standing in the courtyard of the cathedral of Notre Dame. "Bet it's not as warm in there," Rebekah says, heading for the entrance.

She's right, of course. The cathedral is cool and dark and quiet. Every footstep echoes. There are perhaps fifty people inside but no one says a word; they wander up and down the aisles, peek into side spaces or, like Matt, find a pew and lean back into it so they can gaze up into the impossibly high ceiling. Arches extend so high he expects to see a cloud pass beneath them.

Matt can feel the age of this place, deep in his bones. He thought Mystic Falls had history, but he has never in his life been inside a place as ancient as this. It's as if the earth itself carved it, before any human lived. The way the sound dissipates, reaching upward like the arches, fills him with a sort of religious reverence that has no target – he's never been much for prayer or church. Might have been different if he'd had access to a place like this, he has to admit.

Eventually, Rebekah joins him in the pew. "This place," Matt marvels. There's more that he doesn't know how to say, about the way the austere, carved stones have lasted through uncountable human lifetimes, each as meaningless, as vanishingly short as the next.

"It takes your breath away." She settles in beside him. "I never imagined it would look like this when they laid that first stone."

Her words are more chilling than the incense-stained air.

"It was under construction for generations. You have to understand, this was the first -"

"When?" Matt interrupts, dread preemptively pooling in his gut.

"When what?" she asks.

Asking this question feels like teetering on a precipice. "The first stone."

Rebekah is silent for a moment, her breath shallow. She senses the cliff, too. "The twelfth century."

"You're older than this cathedral."

She nods slowly. "By about a century."

In an instant, he is stalking down the middle aisle and straight out into the bright courtyard. He can hear her footsteps behind him. "Matt, wait," she calls, gaining on him as he slows. "Don't act surprised."

Matt whirls around at her. "I can't even process how old you are."

"But you already knew! We were just talking about how I'm one of the oldest vampires in existence."

"Yeah? Well, it's one thing to be a thousand years old and a whole nother thing to be older than the oldest building in Paris!"

"No, it's exactly the same thing. Which you knew."

"I might have known it, but… fuck, Rebekah."

She looks right into the sunlight, scraping her bottom lip against her top teeth, before turning back to him with a glare. "You're such a hypocrite. You know what I can do as a thousand year old vampire? I can just wait around a few hundred years and make money without even trying. Money I can use to, oh I don't know, travel the world with ungrateful boys."

He folds his arms across his chest. "Just because I haven't said it out loud doesn't mean I'm ungrateful."

She purses her lips. "I thought you were one of the good ones."

"Nope. Just an ungrateful boy," he taunts.

That sets her off. She lets her rage begin to fly. "Over the centuries I've met a lot of people, Matt, so when I say you're one of the good ones – all current evidence to the contrary – I know what I'm fucking talking about!"

"It doesn't matter, though, because you're older than the oldest thing I have ever seen in my pathetic, nothing life. You're older than a cathedral, Rebekah! You're a goddamn fossil!"

"I may be a fossil, but I'm the same damn person who bought you lunch and breakfast and plane tickets and a bloody helicopter ride."

And before Matt can respond, she is gone.

Matt wanders around the Ile de la Cite, Notre Dame's island in the middle of the Seine. It takes him an hour to wind down from their argument – or beginning of an argument, which she abandoned like a spoiled brat so she could have the last word. Of course she did. She has to be the one with every droplet of control. She always has to be the winner, the prom queen, the one with a knife in your gut.

He winds through narrow streets and down wide boulevards – not many, and when he starts to recognize the same shops, he heads back to the courtyard in front of the stupidly ancient cathedral. On a bench in the shade of what is probably a several-hundred-year-old tree, he sits down and stares at the stark, deep shadows against sun-bleached stones. Now that the adrenaline has drained away, he's not so much angry as just stuck. Stuck between the facts about Rebekah (that she is geologically ancient, that she is a bloodsucking monster, that she craps out on arguments before they're over) and the truths that he feels about her (that she yearns for good and love and humanity, that she is generous beyond imagining, that the way her face lights up when he's kind to her rattles his whole foundation).

"Get me a scoop of chocolate!" he hears from the doorway of the cathedral. Six children race across the stones, followed by several adults. One man waits in the sun, watching them leave, and then notices Matt. He walks slowly, and as he comes closer, Matt can see that he is on the older side of middle-aged. Kind face. Loose khakis, hot pink fanny pack, squinty smile. "American, right?"

Matt nods. "What gave it away?"

The man shrugs, gesturing toward the bench, asking to sit, and Matt shrugs back. He sits. "I'm Jerry," he says, offering his big, weathered hand.

"Matt."

"Let me guess. You just finished college and you're here in Europe with a backpack and a guitar."

He shifts. "Not exactly."

"Okay. Summer with extended family in…. Germany? And you're taking a weekend in Paris alone?"

"No, just graduated high school, actually," cracking a grin. It's the first time he's said it out loud, and it sounds pretty damn great.

Jerry leans back against the bench. "Play any sports?"

"Football, sir." The mere mention of football and it's 'sir' to every man older than he is. It's just what happens.

"Running back?"

"Quarterback, actually."

"Good job, good job." Jerry lifts one thigh with both hands and bends his knee back and forth. "I played baseball, myself. Iowa."

"Virginia," Matt counters.

"Never been. Is it nice?"

Where to begin? "Not really, to be honest."

Jerry laughs. "Neither is Iowa. Not really. But I met my wife there. Seems like a million years ago."

Matt tries to picture the adults running after those children moments ago. "Which one was she?"

"She died last year," he says, a little quietly, but lightly. Gently.

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, she always wanted to come to Paris. I never did. Never wanted to go anywhere, really. She knew it, too, so she never really pushed me. Used to call me grandpa, even when we were first dating."

Matt chuckles lightly. "She did?"

"I was, though. She had me pinned. She was a spitfire, a young woman till the day she died. Full of energy, full of spunk. You know, her hair stayed blond when all her sisters went gray? I swear. But me? I was always old."

"Huh," Matt says, because he really has no idea what the man is talking about.

"Everybody has an age, son. An age that matches who they are. Maybe you've already reached it, and you'll start to notice over the next few years that you kind of chafe at the expectation that you'll 'act your age,' that you'll 'grow up.' Or maybe you look around at your friends and wonder how they can be such idiots, because you're really thirty or forty in your head, and when you get there, you'll feel right for the first time in your whole life."

Matt starts to understand.

"For me," Jerry continues, "it was sixty-two. Three years ago. Finally, everything just clicked, and I realized I had always been sixty-two, even when I was a little kid warning my friends not to wade into the creek 'cause they might get hurt."

The thought is like a grenade going off in his head: everybody has an age, no matter how long they live. No matter how long, even if it's sixty five years, or ninety. Or a thousand.

"You must think I'm crazy," Jerry chuckles, bending his other knee a few times.

Matt turns to the man with a wide, grateful smile. "Not at all. Makes perfect sense."

"Yeah? How old are you really, would you say?"

He sighs, leaning back again. "You could probably call me grandpa."

Jerry laughs and pats his shoulder. "Hey, there you are!" he calls, just as a little girl beings to climb carefully onto his lap.

"Evie wanted to bring you the ice cream but she woulda dropped it so Mommy said I could. Here." She proudly holds a cup of chocolate ice cream right in Jerry's face with one hand, balancing a cup of pale pink ice cream in the other.

"This is Melissa, my granddaughter. Mellie, this is Matt, my new friend."

"Hi," she says without looking at him. She licks a drip of her own ice cream, almost letting the chocolate cup fall, but Jerry catches it and sends Melissa off with a pat on the leg.

"Emma would've loved this," Jerry muses, watching the rest of his family collect nearby. "Don't wait, son. Don't ever wait. Nobody lives forever." He sucks in a quick breath, then stands and holds the untouched chocolate ice cream out to Matt.

"Oh, no thank you," he rushes to respond.

"Nonsense. I know how grandpas love chocolate ice cream."

Matt waits until dusk, but Rebekah doesn't return. Finally, he starts back toward their hotel. It's probably four miles, maybe more, but Matt doesn't have a single Euro in his pocket and his Visa card is maxed out. Foot power is all he's got.

Just as well. This will give him time to figure out how to fix things. Because he's not stuck anymore. Now he knows for sure what's true, what's important. And that he blew it.

The facts are useless. They don't mean a thing. Okay, sure, she's a thousand years old, but inside she's sixteen and she always, always has been. She's easily influenced, and hopelessly romantic, and needs reassurance because she's sixteen. She could live to be a million and she'd still be sixteen.

And a thousand years ago, the human life she should have had was snatched away. But she still wants to live that human life, like any sixteen year old does, and wanting it makes her more human than most people he's known in his short life. That's what motivates her to be good – Matt may be a role model right now, but it's her desire for humanity that will keep her on the straight and narrow, even when Matt is long gone.

Which he will be someday, old and wrinkled and sore like Jerry, and Rebekah will still be sixteen, inside and out. And then Matt will die, and it will be too late.

He breaks into a jog.

Matt doesn't even bother with the elevator. He takes the stairs up to their floor two at a time, keys already in his hand, and swings his door open wide, thinking – hoping – Rebekah will be waiting for him in his room.

She's not there. But on his bed is a plane ticket.

Matt picks it up. One way, Paris to London, London to Dulles, Dulles to Richmond. Matthew Donovan. 9:22am. Tomorrow.

Shit. He opens his bathroom door and knocks on hers from inside the bathroom. "Rebekah? Are you in there?"

There's a creak, maybe.

"Rebekah, look," he begins. "I'm sorry."

There's so much he wants to say. So much he has to say. But he's not great at this sort of thing, and he knows it.

"I've been a jerk. I should have acted more grateful. I should have told you how amazing this whole thing is. It's just that – it's hard to accept so much. It was like 'no big deal, I'll just show you all of these amazing places in the world,' but that was huge for me, because it was the only chance I'd ever have to get out of there. I just know it. The minute we're back in Mystic Falls, I'm bussing tables and that's it. I have nothing to give you that even comes close to this kind of gift. Which is why I've been an asshole. But I really am grateful, more than I can say."

He waits for her to open the door. Or to say something. But she doesn't.

"And then I completely wigged out about the cathedral, which was stupid. It just – it was so weird to think that you were that old. Yeah, I knew you were. But I didn't have anything to compare it to. And then, that place is so huge, and even the air inside it is old, just unbelievably, historically old."

Another creak.

"That's not the point. The point is it freaked me out, and it shouldn't have. If I had been paying attention to what was important, it wouldn't have." He takes a deep breath and hopes that he can explain this the way it goes in his head. "I realized after you left that you're still you. I know that sounds stupid, because of course you are, but living as long as you have, and being a vampire… none of that is who you really are."

He leans his forehead against the hard, unforgiving wood of the door.

"You're a girl, a sixteen year old girl with a huge, generous heart, who wants goodness and fun and who maybe doesn't realize that she already is good on the inside. You're a teenage girl, no matter when you were born – it's your personality. You want to be connected to people, and you have no idea how beautiful and sunny and great you are. But you are. And I see it."

"You do?" Rebekah says, from behind him.

He turns and there she is, standing in his hall doorway. Her eyes are red and a little puffy and her hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail. A heavy tote bag is weighing her down on one side. A dark gray splash stains the skirt of her daffodil yellow dress.

"You came back," she says, her voice high and hollow.

Matt doesn't know how much she heard of his apology, but words have never been his strength anyway. So he holds up the plane ticket and rips it in half. Then he takes the space between them in two strides, sliding his hands against her jaw as she raises her face toward his. A question barely begins to form on her lips when he eclipses them with his own.