"You say that as though it surprises you," Thom remarked mildly. "But everyone knows you do it on purpose, you know; you aren't fooling anyone." There had been various points in his life when August had had excuses for being anti-social, to an extent — when his fiancee had died, when he'd suddenly acquired a ward and needed to adjust his household to accommodate the boy, when his fiancee had shown up again undead. Even before any of that, though, August had never exactly been the darling of society; he only seemed to enjoy himself on the fringe, and he knew better now than to indulge too much in fringe-of-society events. Having one's leg run over by a carriage would do that for you, Thom supposed.

"You aren't very convincing when you pretend to care about these things," he pointed out. "Honestly, even I'm not convinced you wouldn't have slipped off to a life as a recluse in a cave somewhere if you hadn't had a friend like me to make sure you saw the sunlight every now and then."

(Thom had not been intending the comment as a reference to the vampire-fiancee thing, but realized belatedly that it might certainly have come across that way. Oh, well. It wasn't as though he could still be sensitive about it; she was dead, mostly.)