A/N: This story is a missing scene from the end of New Moon. Simply put, I feel like New Moon suffers from too much Bella and not enough of the other characters like Esme, Carlisle, Emmett, etc., who are what keep me persevering through the saga. Particularly, I thought the first person narration cheated the reader of the emotional responses of most of Edward's family to his attempted suicide, both before and afterward. Esme needed to be given her chance to have the breakdown any mother would if her son attempted suicide, so I wrote this fic to give her (and me) that emotional release.

Fits the Caesar's Palace Prompts Caesar's Challenge: Level One, Prompt 12: Family.

Disclaimer: Twilight is the property of Stephenie Meyer. No copyright infringement is intended. The picture book referenced and quoted in this story is Love You Forever by Robert Munsch.

A soft tap disturbed my thoughts. I jumped, suddenly aware of Esme's consciousness on the other side of the door, which my mind had been too full to register until a moment ago. I made a brief, half-hearted attempt to compose my features before letting her in, but I quickly gave it up. She would know anyway. Sometimes motherly instinct was as powerful as mind-reading.

"Come in, Esme," I murmured.

The warm yellow light from the hallways spread out into a puddle on the dark floor, then leaked back out as Esme shut the door behind her without a sound. Her eyes found me easily in the blackness, motionless as stone on the long couch. I waited. Her movements as she came to sit beside me were gentle and calm, but I heard—and she knew that I heard—her turbulent thoughts.

Her small hands wrapped themselves around mine, trying to massage the tension out of my rigid fists. I yielded to her touch, letting her unbend my fingers one by one until she could clasp her own fingers around them in motherly concern. Bella thought Esme's hands were as hard and cold as mine, but to me there had always been a difference. She was not quite soft, not quite warm, but she was softer and warmer than I was, or Alice, or certainly Rosalie. Carlisle had said that such a thing was impossible, but he had also agreed with me in the same breath.

"Edward?"

I didn't answer, waiting for her to go on. She was silent for another long moment, unsure how to begin. Finally, I picked the question out of her head that was the least difficult to answer.

"Bella's fast asleep. I needed to go somewhere to think where her face and her scent weren't distracting me every few seconds."

Esme nodded. She kept her voice carefully neutral as she asked the next question, but I heard in her mind the pain that accompanied it: "Do you need me to leave you alone?"

"No, Mom." My fingers tightened around hers, refusing to let her pull away. A smile crept into her eyes. We didn't often call her Mom, and she loved it when we did.

I heard her trying to edit her next words, trying to make them less painful for me. I spoke before she could find a way to soften what she was thinking: I know you want to be with Bella, but the rest of us are hurting, too. We need to you talk to us.

"I know, Mom." There was a tightness in my chest, around my still heart. For the thousandth time since my transformation, I was grateful that vampires were unable to cry. We were reaching the point in the conversation that for most humans would have brought on the waterworks. "I'm sorry. It's just—I thought I'd lost her."

"I understand, Edward. She's your mate, or will be. I would have felt the same if I'd nearly lost Carlisle; or Alice, Jasper; or Rosalie, Emmett. But she's safe now. And your family—" Her voice broke, and I knew she was wishing she could cry as fervently as I was grateful I could not.

I reached out and pulled her into my lap, and she dry-sobbed into my chest. I hated seeing her like this. Her body shook as she pressed against me, and her thoughts were an agonized tangle in which I struggled to pick out coherent words. I rocked her back and forth, trying to calm the storm. An image flashed into my head, of a picture book I had idly picked up one Mother's Day when I'd been looking for something to buy her. The book, about a mother rocking and singing to her child at various stages of his growing up, had hardly been applicable to the surrogate mother of a decades-old teenage vampire, and I had put it back. The picture on the last page came back to me now, though, when the boy, now a man, had come back to cradle his mother when she was old and weak. Esme would never be old, but she was weak now—weak and exhausted with worry and hurt. Was it possible that I should have been the cause of all this?

"I thought you would all be okay," I whispered into the darkness. I felt Esme go still. "I knew it would hurt you, and Carlisle, and Alice. But you and Carlisle have each other, and Alice has Jasper, and then there's Emmett and Rosalie. I'm the odd man out. It wouldn't have broken anyone to lose me. Rosalie would have felt guilty for being the one to set this all off, but she would have had Emmett to comfort her, and in time you would all have realized that I would have done the same thing no matter who had told me about Bella's death. And Emmett—well, nothing ever bothers Emmett…"

I hadn't meant to stop, but an image had filled Esme's mind that made me gasp in sudden pain. It was Emmett, wreaking destruction on a swath of forest while he screamed in agonized fury. I saw Rosalie going to calm him, and he crumpled to the ground at her touch, his huge body shaking. I pressed my eyes closed, trying to push the awful image from my head.

Still, I went on. "Jasper would grieve because Alice was grieving, but I doubted he would feel more than that. And Alice would retreat into her own little world like she does, until eventually, I hoped she would be able to forget just what she was retreating from." I heard in Esme's thoughts the denial with which my own mind reproached me now. Even for Alice, that would have been impossible.

"And you and Carlisle…"

This time the images flew thick and fast through Esme's head. The moment she and Carlisle found out what I was going to do, the look of desperation on Carlisle's face, the sudden weakness in Esme's knees as she collapsed against him. Carlisle seeking a private place to sink to his knees in despair, while Esme watched, unable to comfort him because she could find no comfort herself. Esme dry-sobbing against Carlisle's chest as she had just done against mine, while Carlisle shook against her with his own sobs. Carlisle pacing, phone in hand, glancing at the clock every few seconds. Esme trying to pack her clothes into a suitcase but unable to keep her shaking hands from dropping things. The wild joy and relief in her heart when she first caught sight of me, alive and well, at the airport.

I squeezed her tighter. "It was supposed to be okay," I whispered. "Like it was supposed to be with Bella. Like I'd never existed."

She broke away and looked up at me, her golden eyes full of compassion and love. "When are you going to get it into your head, Edward, that you can't step into somebody's life and leave it unchanged? Knowing you leaves an indelible mark, my son." She reached up and brushed my cheek. "You can't just take yourself out of somebody's life at will and ask them to pretend you were never there. You will always leave a hole. For Bella. For Alice. For Emmett. For all of us." She clutched her arms across her chest in an echo of the hole that Bella had described feeling in my absence, and I heard the agony of loss in her mind again.

"I'm here, Mom," I said, pulling her close again to banish that feeling of emptiness. "I'm here. I'll never do that to you again, I swear. I'll always be here."

"Thank you, son."

The sobs started again, quieter and gentler this time. I began to rock her softly, and as I did, the tender lullaby that had accompanied that picture hummed softly in my memory:

I'll love you forever,
 I'll like you for always.
 As long as I'm living,
 My Mommy you'll be.