Yet it feels like a lifetime, and by some definitions, I suppose it is.

But just as quickly as my fortunes turned after New Orleans, leaving me to live as a vagrant in a rocky hollow in the park, here I am at a proper desk under a leaded window, a thick rug at my feet. How quickly I am slipping back into human ways!

The Sutherlands seem like a kind family. I picture tempestuous Bridget and her long-suffering older sister as mirror versions of Damon and myself. I never appreciated how harmless Damon’s and my father’s fights were back when they were just about horses and girls. I was always terrified one of them would say or do something that would end forever what semblance of a family we had left.

Now that my father is dead and my brother and I are…what we are, I realise how much more serious things can get, and how simple and easy life was before.

I shouldn’t stay here, even tonight. I should sneak out of the window and flee to my place of exile. Being enfolded in the warm, living embrace of the Sutherland family for any amount of time, no matter how short, is dangerous and deceptive. It makes me feel like I could almost belong to the world of humans again. They don’t realise they have welcomed a predator into their midst. All that would need to happen is for me to lose control once, to slip from my room right now and take my fill of one of them, and their lives would be filled with tragedy – just as mine became when Katherine arrived on our doorstep.

Family has always been the most important thing to me, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit how comforting it is to be among people who love one another, if only for one borrowed night…

For the first time since I’d left New Orleans, I rose with the sun, intent to slip out of the mansion and disappear into the morning mists before anyone came to wake me. But it was hard to resist the pull of crisp linen sheets, the soft mattress, the shelves of books and the painted ceiling of my room.