Chapter 14: Letting Go
The bar was dark when I arrived at three AM.
Not closed-dark—the cleaning crew had finished hours ago, and the security lights still glowed at their standard intervals. This was intentional darkness, the kind someone created when they wanted privacy for a difficult conversation.
George sat at the bar with two whiskeys poured.
"Been waiting for you," he said.
I took the stool beside him. The whiskey's smell filled my nostrils—oak and honey and the particular sharpness of cheap bourbon. George's late wife's preferred brand, according to the bottles I'd seen in storage.
"I figured you would be."
He pushed one glass toward me. A gesture of hospitality he'd made a thousand times across five decades of bartending. The fact that I couldn't drink it didn't matter. The ritual did.
"How long have you known?" I asked.
"About you?" George's laugh was dry, pained. "Week two. Maybe sooner. Cold hands, never eating, only showing up after dark. I served vampires at this bar before the Revelation—back when y'all were just rumor and legend. I know the signs."
"You never said anything."
"Figured you'd tell me when you were ready. Or you wouldn't, and that was fine too." He lifted his own glass, swirled the amber liquid. "The way I saw it, you were either going to kill me or help me. You weren't killing me, so I let things play out."
Survival instincts. Developed over decades of marginal encounters.
The revelation that George knew—had always known—should have triggered alarm. Instead, I felt something closer to relief. One less mask to maintain, with someone who mattered.
"The doctors adjusted my timeline," George said. His voice was matter-of-fact, the practiced calm of someone who'd accepted their mortality. "Two months is optimistic now. Maybe six weeks if I'm lucky."
My blood reserve sat at 85/220. I could feel the hunger beneath my thoughts, the constant awareness of heartbeats in the surrounding neighborhood. But George's heart was steady, unafraid.
"What do you want?"
"I want to die here." He gestured at the bar around us—the oak counter, the liquor bottles, the photographs behind the register. "This is my home. Mary and I built it together. I don't want to spend my last days in some hospital room surrounded by strangers."
"That can be arranged."
"No ambulances. No tubes. When it happens, it happens here, and you let it."
I understood what he was asking. Not just to die in his bar—to die without intervention, without the desperate measures that modern medicine could provide. A quick end rather than a prolonged one.
"Are you asking me to—"
"No." George's voice was firm. "I'm not asking you to do anything but respect my choice. When the end comes, you let me go. That's all."
We sat in silence for a long moment. The bar's security lights cast strange shadows across the floor, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked at nothing.
"You've been good to me," George said. "Better than I expected. Better than I deserved, maybe." He reached behind the bar and retrieved something—the photograph I'd seen a dozen times, his wife Mary standing in this same spot in 1973. "She'd have liked you. She always had a soft spot for the weird ones."
He handed me the photograph.
The woman in the image smiled at a camera that no longer existed, captured in a moment of happiness that had ended three years ago. I held it carefully, aware of its weight.
"I can't accept this."
"You can and you will. Consider it part of the sale—emotional inventory." George's smile had pain in it, but also peace. "When I'm gone, you'll have two photographs in this bar. Mary's, and whoever that woman is you carry in your pocket. Might as well start a collection."
Maria. 1923. The original Sam's mystery.
I'd been carrying her for weeks now, unable to discard someone else's memories. George had noticed, because George noticed everything.
"What happens to the regulars when you're gone?"
"They'll drink elsewhere for a while. Then they'll come back, because this is home. Make sure there's someone behind this bar who understands that." He finished his whiskey in one long swallow. "I should go. Staying up this late isn't good for a dying man."
He slid off his stool with the careful movements of someone conserving what strength remained. At the door, he paused.
"You're different from the stories. The scary ones, the monster ones. Maybe that's why I never minded." He didn't wait for a response. "Goodnight, Sam. I'll see you tomorrow."
I watched his car pull out of the lot, taillights disappearing into the Louisiana darkness. The photograph of Mary sat on the bar where he'd left it, smiling at decades that had already passed.
Six weeks. Maybe less.
Some things couldn't be fixed with planning. Some things just ran out.
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