He was honestly too happy she was still breathing to grasp the whole weird problem just after she came back, alive, and without a certain Cullen. After watching her halfway recover for a couple days, he got the whole picture from her over a cup of hot cocoa shaking in her hand.

The Volturi promised they'll let her live in peace, as long as her bloodsucker joins them.

By the time she burned her tongue, he'd already decided what he was going to do for her.

And they've been on the road now, building their army, looking for any shape shifters who don't tell them to fuck off before they're even done explaining the plan. The fire they're making dessert with reeks of the vampire that was headed for a group of campers, the second one they've taken out this week. The smell is awful to everyone except Bella, but all the wood around them is too wet to burn.

"S'mores in December. This is the life." Embry blows out a flame with his arm around Nina, the girl in the whiter-coated Chippewa pack who's quickly becoming Leah's best friend. Bella realizes it is really winter, they have really been doing this for a year now: filling a retired tour bus with three families of wolves they're hoping to eventually make four because their numbers aren't yet good enough for the long-impending siege on Volterra.

Alice knows what Bella's doing and has not seen Edward, but she sees the Sicily postcard Edward sends to Forks, relays the message as if it's her own: "He has forever to get out of this. You've only got one life."

She says this on speaker while Jacob is in the room, and Bella finds herself unable to protest about her own forever, not when she's wearing his jacket that smells like beach and bonfire and everything that's him.

Another postcard comes. When Alice tells her, the message is familiar, as if Edward knows he's said it before.

"Be happy."

And Callum's band breaks out the skin drums and guitars almost every night and she knows all the songs by now. They play a Christmas tune the evening that Bella lets Jacob kiss her because she doesn't know what else to do anymore. He doesn't think it's a promise but he whispers, "I'm glad you're not hurting like that now." She has never hated happiness so much, the way it's pushing on her edges and sneaking up her sleeves. The way it wins.

She waits the next morning as Jacob talks to all the packs. There's a lot of cursing and disappointment but at the end some hugs and handshakes. Jacob takes the rest of his pack, and Bella takes his hand, and they're walking to the bus station, quiet and tired.

"At least you gained some friends, right?" she mutters.

His bare hand squeezes around her mittened fingers. "I got a lot more than that."