How could I leave you without something to think about? I'll try to put up a couple of Chapters before I go and post if I can while away. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and review. Just a quick warning to anyone who is impatient to get Bella and Jasper together, it doesn't happen quickly but when it does I promise it will be different. Jules x

Chapter One

Bella

When I was a little girl I dreamed of many things, Castles, Princes, Knights on White Horses, all the things from Fairy Tales. As I grew these changed to hopes for the future, a boyfriend who loved me, a home, a family, stability, and safety. Now I know that the latter was as way out of reach as the former, at least for me. Some girls have the luck to have their dreams come true but me, I seem to attract not the Happy Ever After but the bits you don't hear about. Where the Prince decides on another pretty girl, where the ogre eats the Fair Maiden before the Knight arrives to save her. The bits no one wants to talk about, the Boyfriend who doesn't care about flowers, candles, wine, and romance, or the husband who drags his wife round the countryside from trailer to trailer, never settling anywhere, always chasing his own dreams. I guess my life could have been worse, maybe I'm just feeling sorry for myself as I sit here in this tiny one bed apartment looking at a broken TV and wondering where it all went so wrong and if my present idea were really worth the effort.

I had the chance of a Happily Ever After, not once but maybe twice and it just disappeared like smoke on the wind. My Prince Charming decided that I was too much trouble, too complicated to be in his life, not worth the effort. That was the first time I felt my heart break. Then I was given a second chance but this was no more real than the first. My heart patched and battered was captivated by another, well maybe that's putting it too strongly. I decided that any life was better than the empty ache that was my heart so I married the man who loved me even though he knew I would never really be his. He made all the effort while I coasted along, outwardly happy but still dead inside. Then came the turning point, a baby. My heart beat a few times with timid excitement but it wasn't to be. I lost the man who loved me, an accident no one could foresee and then my final link with the real world, my baby far too early to survive, the shock of losing Jake they told me.

I went back to Charlie's with a raw hole where my heart had been, no longer caring about the real world, it wasn't for me, too painful. The pills I took to stop me screaming away my nightmares only numbed the pain a little but nothing stopped it, always there and ready to overtake me at the slightest sign of weakness. Charlie's Doctor who had helped me crying into this world did his best to stop me screaming my way out and Charlie stood by helpless and watched. Only the new tablets, a free trial from a Hospital in Boston kept me going, kept the world away enough for me to function, crushed the pain to a dull ache. I wasn't sure whether to be grateful they'd accepted me on the trial or not and I was too numb to care.

Renee and Phil visited regularly and every time they begged me to go back with them but I always refused, the thought of the heat, the sun, was more than I could bear. Rainy, dismal, Forks suited my mood far better. I'd given up on the idea of College although Charlie and Renee tried their damnedest to coax me to go as a mature student. Mature! I felt a thousand years old and as if each year had dragged me down still further. Instead I got a job in Port Angeles, at the very Book Store where I'd purchased the book on Quileute Legends which set me on this downward spiral. Well played a part in it at least.

I got up, had breakfast, went to work, came home, cooked dinner, read, showered, and went to bed. Nothing exciting, nothing but the dull routine that meant I could live inside my head nearly all the time. It wasn't a nice place to be but the alternative was no better. Things went along like this until one day I got to work and realized I'd forgotten my pills. I couldn't be bothered to drive all the way back to Forks so I soldiered on, with seemingly no ill effect, so the following day I skipped them too. By the end of the week I felt more alive to the world around me, colors were coming back, sounds registered. I wasn't sure this was a good thing but it was a change from the grey silence I'd become accustomed to.

After eight days the shakes started and Charlie got worried, calling the Doctor who came out and examined me. He took blood samples, so I knew he'd soon find out I'd stopped taking my medication, then went down stairs to talk to Charlie as if I were a child. So I sneaked to the top of the stairs to listen in, yeah I know, childish!

"What's wrong Doc? She was doing so well on those new tablets, no more crying fits, no more nightmares."

So well? He and I obviously had a different concept of that!

"I'm not sure Charlie. I've rung the Hospital in Boston and left a message. I'm hoping the Specialist will get back to me soon. I've only spoken to him once, I usually speak to his Registrar Dr Coleman."

"Oh, I thought Coleman was Bella's Specialist."

"No he works for a Specialist who deals with trauma cases, mental trauma that is. I think he had a relative who lived around here, it's not a name I hear often, he was a Doctor too."

With a sinking heart I knew the name before he said it, Cullen. Would I never be free of the Cullens?

"You mean Carlisle Cullen?"

"Yes he was here for a few years while I took time off. Did you know him well?"

"Yes, too well I'm afraid. Well let me know what this guy says. What do we do in the meantime?"

"Just keep an eye on her."

So Carlisle Cullen had been treating me without my knowledge, why? If he was involved in my life then he knew my sad story, why didn't he contact me directly? I know Charlie would have gone nuts but I would have liked to know. Anyway what did Carlisle know about mental trauma? He'd been a Hospital Consultant, working with physical trauma and even as a vampire it would have taken him time to learn about human mental problems and design drugs to help people. I had a bad feeling about this, a feeling that there was something underhand about the whole thing. This wasn't another Cullen, it was the same one working in a new specialty on an old patient without her knowledge. As far as I was concerned, this Lab Rat had taken her last dose of Dracula's potion.

I went back into my room and found the bottle of pills, peeling the label off. It looked all very official but for the first time I noticed it wasn't dispensed around here. It was obviously supplied by the specialist in a pharmacy in the Hospital he worked in and shipped out here. Booting up my computer I typed in the name of the Hospital but got no hits on his name there. I checked the spelling and tried again, still no hits. I tried typing in 'Clinics in the Boston area' which was the address on the label but there was nothing looking anything like it. I tried Mental Health Clinics then decided it might be easier to find Doctor Coleman than Dr Cullen at the place he worked but no luck there either, the plot thickened. If I couldn't find him or any Hospital or Clinic where he worked then something was wrong, even more wrong than I had suspected.