Disclaimer: All rights and characters are Property of Stephanie Meyer. This is solely a non-profit depiction of the lives of her characters (except for those I am creating for the sake of plot) after the story ended from my perspective. Also, I am basing the timeline on that of the "Missing Pieces" series by PA Lassiter. Much like Lassiter, I am giving this story through Edwards's eyes, for two reasons. One, through Edward, it will allow us to look at all characters thoughts on a situation, and two, as a man, it is easier for me to identify with him. I will not spend much time with backstory as it is presumed you have read the original material and are familiar with the characters. I will only have backstory to catch us up to the current point in the Cullen family. Enjoy…

Chapter 1: It's Been a Long Day

It has been nearly 6 decades since our last run in with the Volturi. My family still continues it generally sheltered existence, keeping much to ourselves to avoid public scrutiny. Fortunately for most of my family, because of the age we were turned into the immortal, we can pass for up to a ten to fifteen years older or a few years younger than we were, making living in one place for long periods much easier, allowing Renesmee, my miracle of a daughter, plenty of time to explore each new environment we must move to before we must move on.

I once thought of my kind as never changing, never developing after the change from mortal to immortal. I thought of us as literally frozen in time. But, of course, it seems I was wrong about that. Over that last near 60 years, my family has gone through quite a few drastic changes. Not surprisingly, most were inspired by my Bella. It became an unspoken goal of our family to further develop our "extra" abilities after witnessing Bella's amazing growth during the Volturi conflict. Her display of power and control urged us all to find greater depths in our skills then we'd ever believed possible. Jasper had learned that he could not only manipulate emotions, but control them. Not just nudge the dial, but completely change the course of ones action by projecting apathy or excitement directly into someone's mind. Renesmee had grown out of her need to touch to share her gift. She could put pictures of her mind directly into yours from a good distance away. It would only work with one person at a time, but we all felt with practice, she would eventually become as skilled as Zafrina, our Amazonian friend who had become very close with Nessie due to their similar talents. But the greatest growths were shown in Alice and myself.

With some insight from Carlisle, my father and creator, I discovered that my ability as a mind reader was vastly under developed. I could only hear the current thought in a mind, and hear everyone in a crowd all at one time. This has been the bane of my existence when I was forced to sit through days of high school, and still is whenever we move to a new area in which I had to pretend to be in my teens, instead of my 20s, or 160s if I was being honest. After a half century of practice, I had now learned to focus my mind reading on one specific mind, and in doing so, much like Aro, I could also see any strong memories they carried. I couldn't see everything their mind ever held, but any moments in time their mind held to tightly, significant memories, I could easily sift through. I also learned to completely tune out others mental voices, much to the delight of my family who wanted their intimate moments to remain private.

Alice, not to be outdone in anyway, set out on a seemingly impossible task. She had never been able to see the futures of hybrid creatures such as the shape-shifting wolves of the Quileute clan, the only humans who knew the whole truth about my family, and human/vampire children like my daughter. She surmised that because they were beings she never herself had been, she could not "see" them, they were blind spots because of the genetic makeup of them. But a thought occurred to her. I could see into the minds of these hybrids, her husband could influence their emotions, so genetics must not be the cause. With study she figured out why she could not see them. Her gift was entirely internal in its manifestation. It was not something that affected others, only her own mind. She KNEW vampires and humans, but hybrids were out of her "norm", therefore she could not see through their responses with her own expectations. With that thought in place, she attempted to correct this. She would spend hours with Renesmee, asking her to share any and every thought she had, emotion she felt, reactions to everything she encountered. She hoped that by learning the way Renesmee thought, how "her kind" reacted to stimuli, she could remove the veil over her future. Over time, years, bits and flashes of Renesmee began to appear in Alice's mind. Then one day, during their daily interaction, the flood gates opened, and Alice saw years and years of coming events in my daughter's life. And not only hers, but also that of our Brazilian half vampire acquaintances, Nahuel and his sisters. By knowing one, she knew them all in a way. What she saw in our Nessie's future surprised her the most, but she chose to keep it to herself, as we would all learn soon enough.

Somethings, fortunately, did remain the same. My family was as close knit as ever. Each of our individual personalities still formed a strong family unit we all could depend on. Our still mostly predictable behavior still brought on the laughs, the happy vampire tears, the exasperated sighs (mostly due to my brother Emmett's never ending jokes that we both loved and hated at the same time). Bella and I still after all this time, remained as in love and passion as we had when our marriage first began. Spending night after painfully short night wrapped in each other, physically and emotionally, not fading one bit in joy over the years. As expected, Bella's strength decreased to that of your normal vampire after her first year, leaving me the dominant one once again. Bella didn't mind, though. She no longer had to worry about inuring me during sex. And she enjoyed when I took control and knew that I would not deny her if she ever wanted to take the reins from a physical standpoint. Her eyes had faded to the gold that we all carried due to drinking the blood of animals, but much to my pleasure, small flecks or her milk chocolate eye color that I loved so much began to show in the gold. This of course caused me to inspect the eyes of my family closely, noticing small hints of blues, browns and greens in all of them. The red eyes of newborns and vampires feeding on humans covered up any hints of the color, and even in us, human eyes could never detect the subtle aberration, but still it was there.

Yes, my life has been beyond my expectations in the years since I married Bella. My daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman. She stopped aging slightly younger looking than expected. She looked to be no older than 16 (much younger looking than we had expected looking at the other hybrids we knew, likely caused by us completely cutting the human blood component from her diet after her first year), so in public she could pass for Bella's or my younger sister (even at the oldest ages we could claim to be, we still looked far too young to have a 16 year old child). When she stopped aging, I began to worry more and more about the situation with Jacob, Bella's werewolf (shape shifter) best friend. He had imprinted on my daughter moments after her birth, and in the Quileute culture, a wolf always married the object of his imprint. But even fully matured, she could never pass for Jacobs's wife. She still looked like a teen, and while his wolf genes prevented him from actually aging, his physical growth placed him well into his mid-twenties. We all were concerned that her step into maturity would spur new thoughts in Jacob, seeing Nessie as a mate instead of just a close loved one. But that apparently was nothing to even be concerned with. Jacob told me once that he would be whatever Nessie needed him to be, and at the age of maturity, she saw Jacob as a loving uncle, much the way she saw Emmett and Jasper. And Jacob graciously accepted that role without even a hint of disappointment. He was just happy to have her in his life in any way that allowed him to be close and to care for her. In a way, the choice of relationship Nessie made freed Jacob in a way. Since she had made it clear through thoughts that I translated to him and actions between the two that their relationship would never leave the realm of familial, his eyes were open to other possibilities for his future.

Not that the events that followed were any less of a surprise than Nessie's choice. We were all surprised, some more than others to discover our family, with the extension of the wolfs, were still a family of firsts. Jacobs second in command, Leah Clearwater, never liked to be close to my family. But she also never wanted to be too far from Jacob. We never understood why exactly, since she was more than capable to run the pack business, but for years she would always come to Jacob first before any decisions. I am not sure how I missed it, maybe being in the pack mind as the only female for so long gave Leah practice at hiding thoughts she didn't want to share, but once Renesmee had settled into the comfortable relationship status between her and Jacob, Leah came clean. At some point in the past, Leah had imprinted on Jacob. For the first time in history (since she was the first female wolf in history and there had yet to be a homosexual shape-shifter to our knowledge) a double imprint had occurred. A wolf imprinted on someone who had imprinted on another. In any other circumstance, someone's heart would have been broken beyond all repair. But thanks to my precious daughter's decision, Leah was free to express her devotion, and Jacob, knowing it would not interfere with his imprint on Renesmee, was free to accept it.

When Jacob told us the news, his mind lingering on their first "contact", I listened intently to Nessie's thoughts, searching for any negative reaction to it. Fortunately I heard nothing but true joy from her mind. She was elated that Jacob had found happiness like the kind she saw in her mother and father. Focusing in, I heard that she had been worried that by not falling into line with the norm for imprinted women, she was stealing his future away from him (like father, like daughter). She was happy that he had moved on so to speak, and could be happy with Leah and she would still have her Uncle Jacob.

Of course our lives had not been completely rosy. The time finally came that the Cullens had to leave Forks Washington. Bella had been spending as much time with Charlie, her father, as she could. It had already been 9 years since Bella's change. He had seen Renesmee grow from a wordless toddler to a graceful teen in an impossible time. He had dealt with the calls from Renee, crying over the "plane crash" from Switzerland that killed Bella and I. He knew that Carlisle had to quit his job at the hospital for "unknown reasons" (in truth, he just couldn't keep making excuses for his age) and had begun commuting to Seattle to work night shifts in a clinic. He had been waiting for the day we just all disappeared. But Bella made sure that he got his proper goodbye and a promise of phone calls from where ever we landed for as long as possible from her and Nessie. On his last visit, he had even hugged me goodbye, and in his wordless way, forgiven me for the pain I had caused Bella in her human life and thanked me for his grand-daughter.

We had traveled to Alaska to stay with the Denali clan for a time while we investigated our prospects. Jacob came to visit often, but gave Renesmee space to be an "adult", as she had wanted. We heard through him that after we left, the wolf population had diminished to near nothing. Once we were gone, the urge to phase in the wolves left them, leaving only Jacob, Quil Atera, and Sam Uley, the direct descendants of the original 3 wolves. We received all sorts of news from the place we'd called home most recently. Seth Clearwater, Leah's brother, graduating from college. Mike Newton, a school "friend" of Bella's becoming a police officer under Charlie. But most excitedly, Bella and I received not only news, but an invitation. We were given special permission to enter the Quileute land to attend a special ceremony in which Jacob was appointed official tribal chief. What was amazing was the fact that we were accepted with generally open arms to the event. Everyone knew we were Renesmee's parents, and she had been so kind when she visited with Jacob, that the fear of vampires seemed to finally melt away. We were invited back again a year later for Jacob and Leah's wedding, then once more, to meet their son, the future leader of the tribe.

That was our last visit back to Forks however. On that time, the joy of new life was marred by an announcement from Jacob. Since becoming a father, he wanted to live his life as a family man, to grow with his son. So he renounced his claim as alpha wolf, remaining only the tribal chief, and decided to stop phasing so he could grow old with Leah. For the first time, Renesmee had to deal with the loss of someone. Though he would still be around for years to come presumably, Renesmee knew that he would not last forever like the rest of her family. But, being her mother's daughter, she hid her own pain and showed nothing but support for his decision, acceptance for his promise that for long as he was able, if she ever needed anything, he would come running as fast as his body would carry him. As we traveled home (by car for Renesmee's benefit) I heard her whisper in her mind a simple goodbye to her Uncle Jacob. She handled it with grace, and I would leave her to her thoughts until she wished to say them aloud.

Bella had made a joke the first day of her new life, saying that this was the first and last day of forever. Well…it had been a very long day. But the biggest surprises were yet to come.