"Bella?"

I'd only been in Forks for forty-eight hours, and already I'd been mistaken for my mother more times than I could count. Although admittedly, in my current inebriated state I couldn't count much of anything.

"Nope," I answered without turning away from the bartender who was making eyes at me. "No Bellas here."

"Oh...sorry." Something in the voice caught my attention. It was male, and deep, and it sounded the way my gimlet-addled brain imagined a lamb's ear felt, but that wasn't what grabbed my ear. "My mistake."

Oh, there it was: the chime of dashed hopes. This one must have been a spurned lover from my mother's high school days. I'd already met Tyler, Mike and James, and the one thing they all had in common was that just after calling me by my mother's name, they had tried to suck me into giving them an update on the state of her marital happiness. I was tired of pretending to be friendly to middle-aged men who resented one half of my genetic makeup and carried a torch for the other half. My mother had a lot of annoying admirers when she was a teen. Although none of them so far had had a voice that sounded like an orgasm in the woods, like this guy.

I half-turned to see who had spoken, and looked up. And up. And...up. He had already started walking away, and all I saw was an ass you could bounce a hubcap off of, cheekbones that would slice Emmentaler, and the shiniest black hair I'd ever seen.

Suddenly the bartender looked a lot less cute.

"Who was that?" I asked my favorite drinking companion, Beth. She was also my cousin, the daughter of my aunt Rosalie and uncle Emmett. It was her old fake ID I was using now: on her twenty-first birthday she had presented me with the driver's license of Shannon Fong-Kline, 27. I'd been using it for the past six months and no one had ever questioned it, either because I looked too boring to start trouble or because I was such a sex-bomb.

Maybe both.

Beth shrugged. "Dunno. Guy from the Reservation, I would guess."

"Do they all look like that?"

"Like what?"

"Um, like seven-foot tall Adonises...Adoni...Adones...help me out here, what am I trying to say?"

"That guy was pretty hot, I guess. Not really my type, but..."

"What, because his genitals are on the outside?"

"That does tend to put a damper on things, yes. Now, if he has a sister...Didn't he look kinda old, though? I thought he looked kinda old."

"I only saw his backside." His sleek, toned backside, held lovingly by his tight blue jeans.

"Well, I don't really know the people here any more than you do."

"You lived here two years ago!"

"Yeah, but I didn't spend time here, I just had a PO box. This town's a crypt." Beth checked her phone and suddenly became all business. "Hey, speaking of, if I'm gonna make it back to Seattle tonight I gotta run."

"Just come crash at Ch-my place."

"Nah, I want to be fresh tomorrow. Love you, sugar." Beth kissed me on both cheeks and vanished.

Sighing, I paid my bar tab-the cute bartender waived off two of my three gimlets and hoped he'd see me again. I cabbed it home and fell asleep the second my head hit pillow.

In a dark bar, in a small town, I could see why everyone mistook me for my mother. In the brilliant daylight of our Santa Barbara home, we looked nothing alike. For one thing, although she was a youthful thirty-seven years old, she would never look nineteen again. We had roughly the same size and build, and everyone said I had her eyes. I didn't see it. Hers were darker, huge drops of chocolate in a glass of milk. Like a Disney Princess. My coloring was what hers would be if you ran her through the wash and her colors ran: lighter brown hair and eyes, darker skin. I thought I took more after my dad, honestly. At least I got his cheekbones. I didn't know where I'd gotten my boobs, since there wasn't a handful of mammary tissue between either parent.

My mother loved to tell me the story of how she and my father met in Biology class, fell in love on a class trip to Italy, and got married right after graduation. I was born three months later. You do the math.

It must have seemed like having a newborn would put paid to Edward's plans of training to become a concert pianist at Juilliard while Bella accepted a scholarship into NYU. But Edward came from money, so there was no need to panic. My grandparents on my father's side lived half the year abroad and it would be impractical for them to take me in, but my Grandpa Charlie volunteered to let me live with him in Forks until my parents could get on their feet. The Cullen grandparents paid for my upkeep, and Charlie had a woman from the Reservation watch me during the day. I loved my parents and my paternal grandparents, but it was really Grandpa Charlie and Leah Uley who raised me, with occasional input from Leah's husband Sam. Everyone thought it would be temporary, a year at the most. Two years. Then three. Four.

It didn't change until my parents graduated from their respective schools and Edward landed a contract with a major record label. They bought a house in Southern California and carted me out there, and I learned the difference between having parents who swooped in like heroes every Christmas and summer to shower me with gifts, and actually living under one roof with them. My dad was a lot more tense and obsessive than Grandpa Charlie; my mom was a total narcissist. I learned all the right things to do and say to their faces while inwardly wishing they'd just let me go back to Forks and live with my saturnine, wonderful old Grandpa Charlie. He used to let me put the worms on the hooks when he took me fishing. My parents didn't even let me put my feet in the glassy green manmade pond in our backyard.

It wasn't all bad. I did still see Charlie, although I never went back to Forks. Instead Charlie visited us. I knew to look in his left coat pocket for candy when we met him at the airport.

My parents didn't like me to have candy, so it was our secret.

When I was six I showed him my rock collection, with a Shells-and-Sea-Glass Auxiliary. When I was eight, he taught me how to skip stones. At eleven, he and I read the entire Series of Unfortunate Eventsout loud to each other, chapter by chapter. By the time I hit fifteen he was starting to give me driving practice in parking lots. Most kids looked forward to summer because it meant a break from school. I looked forward to it because it meant I would get my granddaddy to myself for a whole three weeks.

My father played a maximum of twenty concerts a year, earning international praise with every appearance. It probably didn't hurt that he looked the way he did. Even in the mainstream the name of Edward Cullen was dropped reverently into conversation, usually by the same people who were floored by Andrea Bocelli and Joshua Bell. I personally thought his style lacked nuance. It sounded to me like he was trying to mash out tunes through a thick coating of corn syrup, but combined with those eyes and that rock-star hair his playing pulled in the big bucks. My Grandpa Carlisle always said that Edward could read the minds of the populace and give them exactly what they didn't know they wanted, and there was nothing in our steadily increasing line of cars and houses to contradict that theory.

I disliked my father on the principle that a teenage girl is supposed to be at odds with her dad, but it was my mother who really put me into therapy. Nothing bad ever seemed to happen to the woman. She was forever shielded from the consequences of her actions. Hell, even when she got knocked up right out of high school she didn't have to sacrifice one bullet point on her bucket list. And her charmed existence sometimes extended to the rest of us as well. When the housing bubble burst, our house actually doubled in value. When the government slashed spending on the arts, my father somehow ended up getting paid more to play the piano. When Southern California experienced terrible droughts, mudslides and fires, we were completely unaffected. The only thing she couldn't protect me from was herself. She was hyper-sensitive, and precious, and about as smart as a melted lipstick. She was a terrible mother. My therapist gave me techniques to deal with her self-importance.

It was a pity her halo of invincibility couldn't extend to Grandpa Charlie, who died a few months before my sixteenth birthday. His funeral was the first time I'd been back to Forks since I was four, and on top of my own grieving I had to deal with my mother's jealousy when I bawled into Leah's shoulder instead of hers. I bombed my first driving test because I was crying too hard to see the road. My second road test was scheduled for right after a lawyer came down to Santa Barbara to settle some points with us regarding the limited contents of Grandpa Charlie's will. He hadn't had much in the way of material possessions, but he did have a tiny little three-bedroom house in Forks. Which he left to me.

After I heard that I canceled my driver's test. What was the point? I'd be too distracted to pass.

My parents urged me to sell the house and invest the money wisely, perhaps under the guidance of my aunt Alice, a frighteningly successful investment banker. Instead, the moment I turned eighteen I packed up all my shit and went to live with my black sheep cousin Beth, who owned a small coffee shop in downtown Seattle. I stayed with her for a year, saving up dough until I had enough of a cushion to start living in Forks. My parents staunchly refused to support what they considered my mad rebellion.

"What's in Forks?" My mother demanded, then answered herself, "Nothing. There's nothing in Forks. Trust me, you'll miss civilization after a week."

And she was right. The house felt wrong without Charlie in it, and I remembered it being a whole lot bigger. And aside from people who thought I was my mother, I had nobody here to talk to.

I went back to the bar the next night, but there was a different bartender and no handsome giants tried to talk to me. After that I just spent my time looking for a job. Eventually I was hired for just-above-minimum-wage at the one and only local library. I made a button that said Data Entry Is My Passion and wore it to work. I got another job at the local Barnes & Noble, because I wouldn't be able to keep both the gas and the water running in my nice free house without a second job. I hated both jobs, but I liked working in places that smelled like books.

My father called me up sometimes to ask how I was doing and whether I was regretting this shiftless existence yet. My answer was always no. I don't know what other response he expected to get from a nineteen year old.

I emailed Leah Uley to let her know I was living in Forks again.

Nesmee, she'd written. The Cullens all called me Carlie, short for Renesmee Carlie Cullen. But growing up Grandpa Charlie said it was too confusing to have a Carlie and a Charlie, so he'd given me another nickname, Nesmee. I thought of it as my Forks name.

Nesmee, I'm having a barbecue this weekend. You can meet some of my friends and have some charred red meat. I hope you can come! I miss you!

Leah

Leah's barbecue was on one of the rare sunny days. It was early October but the weather was still warm and the trees hadn't begun to change yet. I made a huge batch of guacamole and another huge batch of mango salsa, and carted it off to the reservation in my VW Golf. The car had been given to me for my seventeenth birthday by my grandparents. They hadn't been able to come to my birthday party because they were touring Venice for the eleventh time, but I liked the car quite a lot.

"Nesmee!" Leah saw me pull up and ran out to help me carry in my mongo bowls of condiments. "I'm so glad you're here! There are not enough women at this barbecue. Sam's got his whole fucking gang eating all the meat before anyone else gets a chance."

"Sam's in a gang?"

"Just a figure of speech," Leah laughed. "So, how long have you been here?"

"Oh, just like a month. I'm still sort of getting settled in."

"Your eyes look sad. Are you holding up okay, Nesmee?" My eyes looked sad?

"Well, you know…I'm living in Grandpa Charlie's old house and I just really miss him. And I don't know much of anyone here so…I just need to get out more, I guess."

"Well, then I'm extra glad you came. Hey, Sam, look who's here!" Sam Uley turned away from the group of guys he'd been talking to and came over. He looked a lot like I remembered, a little thicker around the midsection, grayer on top, considerably more weathered, but with the same matter-of-fact smile. He gave me a big hug.

"Hey, Nesmee, how's it hanging?"

"Low and lazy," I drawled. Sam gave a surprised laugh. "Hey, little lady, I don't remember telling you you could grow up. Now I feel old."

"Oh, Sam," I said sweetly, "You were always old to me." Leah snickered and hurried off with the food I'd brought.

"Want a beer?" Sam asked me. I nodded emphatically. "Hey, come meet the guys." He conducted me to the group he'd been talking to earlier. I recognized a few of them, but just barely. I didn't have a lot of memories from early childhood—except of Grandpa Charlie. "This is Embry Call," he said, and Embry shook my hand. "Paule Lahote, Jared and his wife Kim—" We exchanged courteous nods; I didn't remember any of them. "Quil Ateara, his girlfriend Claire. And you probably remember Leah's brother Seth." Finally, a face I knew.

"Duh!" I squealed. "Hey, Seth!" Seth must have been in his thirties by now, but he looked hot. Actually, all these guys were pretty foxy, and not in the expensive, professionally-buffed manner of my father. They looked like surfers or something, all long-haired and tan, with blindingly white teeth.

"Oh, hey, and I think Jake is around here somewhere…Yo, Jacob!"

A familiar head of shiny hair turned and I found myself looking at the giant from the bar.

Oh my god, and I'd thought his backside looked good…

The giant came over to us. His eyes were expressing a range of emotions that mostly centered on bewildered amusement.

"This is Jacob Black. Jake, you were in college when Nesmee lived with Charlie."

"I've heard him mention you," he said, taking my hand. "It's nice to meet you."

"You knew Charlie?" I asked.

"Yeah, he was best friends with my dad."

"Oh, you must be Billy's son! Well, it's really good to finally meet you, Jacob Black. I was sorry to hear about your dad. He was always really nice to me…"

"Well, thank you. We saw it coming for a while, at least we had time to prepare. I'm sorry about Charlie."

"Yeah…" I didn't really want to stand here and talk about our dead father-figures all day. "Hey, maybe you can show me where the meat is?" Jacob's eyes crinkled and an incredibly warm smile made its way across his lips.

"Yeah, we've got a whole deer over here." We left the group and crossed to the fire pit where, no lie, there was an actual deer on a spit.

"Jesus, you weren't kidding, were you?"

"We're a hungry bunch."

"Where'd you get Bambi from?" I asked as Jacob grabbed a knife and started hacking off bits of thigh.

"Oh, about twelve miles north of here, where it was taking a leak by a stream," he said, handing me a plate heaped with venison.

"You're kidding. You guys shot it yourself?"

"Yeah, Seth and I brought the deer. Sam and Quil cleaned it and Leah cooked it. And Embry ate most of it."

"Poor little Bambi. Poor, delicious Bambi." I tore a chunk off a bone and masticated thoughtfully. "I guess I can picture you with a hunting rifle. It's a pretty scary image, actually."

"Oh, we didn't use rifles."

"Hand guns? Machine guns?"

He quirked his eyebrows at me. "Not really, no. Think low-tech."

"…Tazers?" I hazarded. Jacob laughed.

"Bow and arrows," he said, his white teeth shining. "Harder that way."

"Jeez, I didn't know people still did that."

"Yeah, well, we do. Make your own weapons, make your own ammo…not a bad way to shoot your own food."

"Well, you shot a good one, Jacob Black," I said. "What else do you do for fun?" Jacob picked a piece of meat from my plate and brought it delicately to his mouth. Watching him chew made my insides turn to butter and melt into my underwear. The man made eating deer meat look like porn. Very, very specific porn.

"Well, I fix cars," he offered. "Maybe it shouldn't count as fun since it's my job, but I like it."

"Where would I go to have you look at my car?" I asked. There was nothing wrong with my car, but damned if I was going to let a golden opportunity like this pass.

"You could bring it to the garage. Or I could take a look at it now, if you've got it on you."

I put down the plate and wiped my greasy fingers on a napkin. "Come see." Jacob wiped his hands on his jeans. I brought him around to the front of the house, where I'd parked.

"Hey, nice one," he said admiringly. "The Golf is a good car. You can fit an elk into the back, although the antlers have to ride shotgun."

"I've never tried that," I laughed. "What I really want is to drive a Rabbit. I saw one parked out here..." I pointed five cars down the row. "I'm not enough of a mechanic to own that car. Nobody knows how to fix the damn things anymore."

"Speak for yourself," Jacob said, walking toward the ancient piece of machinery. He leaned against the hood and crossed his feet at the ankles, looking a trifle smug.

"Oh my god, is this yours?" I asked excitedly, bouncing over to it. I ran a hand over the hood, down the grille and across the lights.

"Would you and the car like a moment of privacy?" Jacob asked slyly.

"Whatever, you know this baby turns you on. I've never met anybody who had a car like this who didn't have a major boner for it."

"Well, that's…I don't even know how to respond to that." Jacob started laughing. "You are not at all like I expected." Abruptly I stopped petting his car. I knew what came next; I'd been getting it all month. How's your mother? Is she still with that Cullen guy? Yeah? Still married, huh?

"I get that a lot," I mumbled. "Especially around here."

"Hey, sorry," Jacob said lightly, raising his hands. "I didn't mean to offend. Charlie just never mentioned you were into cars." Charlie? Oh.

"Oh. I'm not, usually. I mean, I can check the oil and everything... Sorry, I thought you were…"

"Thought I was what?"

"Well, ever since I got back people have been comparing me to my mother. Considering she only lived here for three years, a lot of people remember her. It's getting kinda old, actually."

"The thought never crossed my mind," he said.

"Yes it did. You thought I was her, the other night. In that bar." Jacob shrugged.

"Yeah well, I only really saw you from behind. Now that I've got a good look, there isn't much of a resemblance."

"You're the first person to say that. So, you were friends with her?"

"Not really," Jacob said. "We played a little bit when we were really young. She was older than me, I just tagged along." He nudged my upper arm with a conciliatory hand. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"No, it's okay," I said. "I just assumed you were like all the others. I'm glad you're not." I smiled foolishly at him. For some reason, Jacob's gaze dropped and he started to study his bare feet.

"Your feet are disgusting," I said conversationally. Jacob barked out a laugh.

"Well, yeah. Most of me's disgusting most of the time."

"That can't be true."

"Oh, it is," he assured me. "I'm usually covered in engine oil, dirt, dust and occasionally blood. And I have two dogs who shed like motherfuckers."

"Well, I don't mind a little blood," I joked. "You know, I remembered you from the bar as soon as I saw you. I only saw your backside then." Jacob shifted uncomfortably.

"Ah."

"Oh, no need to be embarrassed. It's a very nice backside." The nicest.

"Um, thanks?"

"No problem. So, where's the garage you work at? I should probably take my car in for a tune-up one of these days."

"Yeah, okay. Um, just take County Road 8 to…here, I'd better just write it down." He opened his car door and rummaged around til he found a piece of paper and a grubby pen, then scribbled the address down. His writing was compact and spiky, just barely legible. He didn't include a number.

"So, if I were to go there, say, next week, would I find you covered in engine oil and dog fur and blood?" Jacob laughed. It was a strangely tight sound.

"Yeah, probably," he said.

"Then I look forward to it," I said, handing the pen back to him and pocketing the slip of paper. "I'm gonna go find Leah and reminisce. See you around." I walked into the house. I couldn't resist one last look out the window. Jacob was still standing there, staring at the front door.