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“Oh, someone has an admirer!”

It was my neighbor, Mabel, coming up to admire the flowers.

“Please!” I snorted, looking away to hide my discomfort. “This is some mistake. I’ll ask the hospital to send someone over to collect these, maybe hand them out to patients.”

“It’s no mistake, dear,” Mabel said, telling me she’d seen a man outside my house last night. She crinkled her nose, “I think he was one of those,” she said, with an emphasis on the last word.

I knew what she meant.

The War had ended not that long ago and many of the older generation, especially, remembered that terrible timewhen vampires were at war with human beings and the other creatures on the planet. We were close to losing when a large part of the vampire population was destroyed by a huge bomb. The remaining families had to swear off drinking human blood and sign an agreement to agree to universal laws of respect and courteous behavior that did not include killing for food.

I couldn’t believe that I had slept with him. How could I have been that weak?

I was extremely disappointed in myself.

He was handsome and he had turned on the charm, sure, but I was stronger than that, surely! Had my mind really become this feeble? I couldn’t believe it.

Princess was staying with her grandmother, Tina, and I drove over to their house down the street. The place was almost as familiar to me as my own house. I had spent a few years there, after Aunt Stephanie died, before I went off to military training. That was how Pearl and I became friends, she was like a sister to me.

As soon as I came into the house, I got the smell of coffee and fried eggs. This was what a home smelled like.

“Hey guys,” I said, finding Princess and Grandma Tina sitting at the kitchen table. There were pancakes, waffles and strips of bacon on a plate. I grabbed one of these and sat down at the table.

“Ready for school?”

Princess stuffed the last of the toast in her face and ran off to get her school bag.

“I thought I’d go visit Pearl today,” I said. “You need me to take anything to her?”

Pearl had been in rehab for over two months. She was currently at a kind of step-down facility where she was allowed visitors. She would soon be released and come back home.

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got some cookies for her,” Grandma Tina got up with difficulty, on account of her arthritis. This was why she couldn’t look after Princess full-time and I’d offered to help out.

“Don’t you need to work today?” Grandma Tina called out to me over her shoulder.

“The shop is quiet, Roberto can handle it for a few hours,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Tina chuckled. Roberto could barely handle a tooth brush, never mind the shop.

“He has to learn sometime,” I said with a shrug.

I took a bag with cookies, some clothes and books and then dropped Princess off at school. Afterward, I made sure that Roberto was coming in so that I could switch my phone off for the day. I didn’t want to get any calls from Jack.

I knew he’d call at some point to ask me if I’d gotten the roses. He’d probably go round to the shop to see if I was there too.

I wanted him to get the message quickly. The other night was a mistake. It was not going to happen again.

I was not in the business of sleeping with vampires. I was going to write off that one incidence as a sign that my head was still not completely healed. It was a momentary lapse of reason.

Vampires were vile creatures and I distrusted them. I also suspected that a vampire was behind the attack on my family when I was a little girl. Both my parents and my brother were killed, and I had been left for dead. I had survived the massacre but I remembered very little apart from the sound of beating wings and screaming.

It was not long after the end of the Wars, during which my father had taken us into the wilderness where he thought he could protect us better. He had been wrong about that.

I could be wrong too. Nobody was always right.

That was okay too. Mistakes happened.

I was not as hard on myself as I used to be. People made mistakes, but you learned from them.