Disclaimer: Let's clear the air with this. I do not own Twilight. The book and the time of day. But I do own a mean peanut butter bars recipe.

Summary: Bella's past affects everything in her daily routine. Edward keeps his true emotions hidden better for the sake of his two children. When these two meet at Edward's sister's bonfire, can they unravel many years of fear and guilt and help each other in the long run, or will it be a wasted effort that tears them both down further? AH/AH

A/N: Alright guys, this is my first fan fiction story, but I've been writing for… a long time. I'd like to thank my first beta, Leon McFrenchington. Without him, I would be an insane lady with an even more insane plot. Now, on with it!

Chapter One

No I can't escape

(Stuck on you till' the end of time)

Your insipid rhyme

(I'm too tired to fight your rhyme)

When you shoot it deep

Straight into my mind

Failure - Stuck On You

[BPOV]

Fear, gripping my heart in its vile fingers, squeezed the quickly beating organ as the girl took another step. Then another. And another. The hollow noise of her feet landing on the polished, marble floor resounded through the long, well-lit hall. She turned to a door and twisted the oddly shaped, triangular door knob to the right while slowly pulling the door toward her. Sweat poured nervously down the blonde's face as her head peeked around the door to peer into the closet. As soon as the base of her neck could be seen, a chillingly white hand shot out from the darkness and captured her in his vice like grip. We never saw her again.

"I told her not to go into the closet, goddammit!" Alice screeched while angrily shoving syrup-covered kettle corn into her loud mouth. "Every horror movie has the exact same scene, but the only thing that was different in this one was the face that this chick was wearing an amazing dress that got totally ruined by her blood! I told her not to go into the closet!" My roommate complained about the movie that her fiancé, Jasper, had rented us to watch on our Movie Friday. Every other Friday, one of us would rent a movie for the three of us to watch. This week, it was Jasper's turn, and of course he had to be a horror fan.

"Did I not tell her, Jasper?" Alice turned to him for an answer to her rhetorical question. I also looked over to see if the movie had affected his ever-present calm mood. It certainly had mine, and I was never as calm as he was.

What I saw made me snort with restricted laughter. Jasper had fallen back against a couch cushion, his eyes shut tight and his mouth open slightly. His long, curly blond hair crossed over his forehead, hiding the scar that started from his right ear and ran into his right eyebrow. I didn't know how he got it, but possessing the knowledge of how most scars originate, my curiosity was dampened a bit.

"Oh my God," Alice stated incredulously. "He made us watch that entire fucking thing and he falls asleep half way through it," she complained and turned her head toward the ceiling. "Why?" she asked while throwing her hands up in the air. "Why in God's name-"

"Alice, what's wrong?" I inquired with a roll of my boring, brown eyes. Alice always got melodramatic when something bad would happened. In our junior year of high school, when she bombed the Biology final, she told her mother, Esme, that she was running away. After Jasper and Alice's first date, he didn't kiss her and she told me that night that if he didn't kiss their on the next outing, she would go insane and either be committed, or elope with the first man she saw on the street. Alice informed him of this the day after, and he came over to our apartment very quickly.

"Oh Bella, it's horrible!" she cried, causing Jasper to flip over on the large, black leather couch and me to throw my hands up to cover my ears. Tears were begging to make their way down her perfect, alabaster cheeks as she moved over to the reclining chair I was sitting in and plopped down on my knees.

"What's horrible, Alice?" I questioned slowly, taking my hands away from my damaged-from-other-experiences eardrums, thinking that the worst was over. I had learned that if it was something bad, Alice only needed one shrill outcry to get it out of the way. If it was good, that was completely different.

"Bella, you know the dress that I was looking at in the Vera Wang store last week?" she asked me, mowing down on her lower lip like it was covered in caramel, chocolate chips, and cool-whip. Despite her troubled expression, I could see that she wanted me to say 'yes,' even if I had no clue what she was talking about; which I didn't.

"Yes, Alice," I lied badly as Alice raised her perfectly-plucked eyebrows. I had always been a bad liar. My strong blush would normally give the truth away, and if that didn't, my stammering certainly would. There was a period of time where I had perfected the art of lying, but then I met Alice. The girl came into my life and tore down my mental walls made of brick and mortar. She could tell anything about me from just one look, but mainly whether or not I was lying. I told her it was a good thing she was studying to be a psychologist.

"You have no idea what I'm talking about, but anyways," Alice continued seeing right through my fabrication. She proceeded as if I had said nothing at all and she was talking to a plant. Unless it was something about shopping, make-overs, or fashion, she didn't really care about what you said in response.

"The dress was the most beautiful thing in the world," she gushed enthusiastically, the pitiful look that crossed her model-like features seconds before now long forgotten. When I had first met Alice five years ago, I was a sophomore in high school and thought she had a severe case of mood disorder. She would change her mood so frequently that it seemed she was always on her period.

"I went back today to see if it was still there, and it was gone," she said, putting emphasis on the last three words. She spoke in such a clear and concise manner, just like she was giving directions to Madeline and Anthony, her niece and nephew. With each passing second of silence between us, her blue eyes grew to an impossibly large circumference and Jasper's soft snores filled the air around us.

"Um, I'm sorry?" I didn't say it like a statement, but rather a question and Alice was growing more and more exasperated at my apathy. She drew in a quick breath and I could practically see her counting to ten in her head. That was always her coping mechanism when it came to my indifference to the things that went on in the bridal world.

"You don't get it, Bella! This dress was amazing. It was the most sophisticated and elegant thing in the world, but with the slightest touch of modern flare. And more importantly," she jumped off my lap and her feet landed on the floor with a graceful thud, "it fit me! It fit perfectly with no alterations, my four-eleven frame and size negative seventeen body, fantastically."

I was finally starting to realize the severity of the situation, not based on the characteristics the dress had, but because of Alice's reactions to someone buying the gown. Ever since Jasper had proposed one month ago, Alice had scoured every bridal shop within a one-hundred mile radius of the Seattle area, claiming that the perfect dress was out there. Claiming that she knew what it looked like; saying that she knew the soft kiss of the fabric as it sat "fabulously" on her hips. I frequently called her a psychotic psychic. I knew, though, that she didn't need a reality check or an asylum visit for saying the perfect dress was out there and she already knew exactly what it was like; she just needed her perfect dress.

"So after a semi-dramatic meltdown, I kindly asked the sales lady who bought the dress," Alice said like she had a plot to go up to the woman who had bought her dress, steal it from her closet, and then cut the girl's wrists for committing such a heinous crime. Knowing Alice for as long as I had, she probably did have a scheme similar to that cooked up in her little crock-pot of a mind.

"And get this," she paused dramatically as if she was expecting me to be hanging on to her every word like a Trekkie at the new Star Trek movie. Maybe I should be. If not for Alice's sake, for my own. If she found out that I wasn't paying attention, I didn't want to know what would happen.

"Jessica Stanley," Alice spat like the name was venomous and not the girl. I didn't blame Alice, even though I had gotten over my issues with the gossiping court jester to Lauren Mallory's queen-Dom a long time ago. It was kind of difficult to hold a grudge over someone if you believed every single thing they had said about you.

A whore.

Hussy.

The school slut.

Then there were the insults that cut deeper.

Suicidal.

Statements like "why don't you make a noose and hang yourself already?" were spewed at me everyday as I tried to brave Forks High School with Alice as my one and only friend. The girl was a spitfire when vexed, but she couldn't make all the hurtful rumors go away.

No one could.

I know a girl

She puts the color inside of my world

But she's just like a maze

Where all of the walls all continually change

John Mayer - Daughters

[EPOV]

"Daddy?" I heard a tiny voice say from the doorway. I shot up in my bed, instantly worried about my two-year old daughter, Maddy. She was normally a sound sleeper, hardly waking up when her Disney Princess alarm clock would blare Taking Back Sunday's new album, "New Again," at top volume. Yes, my baby girl was a rocker.

The last time she had waken up in the middle of the night was two weeks after the accident. The hot-pink cast on her left arm was itchy, and she had a nightmare. I had come into her room to find my one-and-a-half year old daughter screaming, with tears running down her cheeks and beads of sweat rolling down her forehead. That was a sight no parent wanted to see on their child.

"What is it, baby? What's wrong?" I asked frantically. Quickly, I flipped on the light that sat on my bedside table to see my daughter. I squinted my eyes against the harsh glare of the hundred watt light bulb. Maddy was standing at my doorway, her curly blond ringlets hanging around her waist, her bangs pushed up in the front from hours of attempted sleep.

Her dark green eyes looked down at the floor. "I couldn't seep," she mumbled as her blood-shot eyes slowly traveled up to reach an exact copy of hers and my heart clenched. "I had nightmare in beginning, den I was 'fraid to go back seep."

"Is Tony up too?" I questioned about her twin brother, Anthony. Since he was my son and mainly took after me, I figured that he would be. As a teenager, and even more so as an adult, my sleeping habits were always askew.

"No," Maddy said as her tiny, tan feet padded over to my bed. She took my head between her tiny hands and squeezed my cheeks so my lips puckered like a fish. "Can I seep wif you, Daddy? I neber have nightmares when I'm wif you."

"Of course, baby. You can sleep with me," I told her in a comforting way and moved over in my bed to make room for my tiny daughter. "I'm sorry about your nightmare. Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked as she pulled back the navy blue comforter and slipped between the sheets.

I took in her disheveled appearance, wincing at the red scratches on her arms. Maddy had always been an active sleeper, often tossing and kicking her brother and me, depending on which bed she was in for the night. This nightmare must have been really bad for her to have angry, red lines crossing her upper arms. Right now, they were giving me more guilt than the scars.

"No Daddy, there's nofing you can do. I is sorry for making you as uncomferable as backing in to a hard-on from some faming homosecual," Maddy giggled at the statement, even though she didn't know what it meant. I hoped.

My mind was temporarily paralyzed as it quickly tried to catch up with my daughter's supposedly squeaky clean mouth. "Where on earth did you hear that saying, Maddy?" I tried to tone down my wrath for whoever had used this saying in front of my sweet, innocent baby girl.

"Auntie Ayice and her friend, Miss Bewwa," she said nonchalantly while trying to withhold a yawn. I could tell that Maddy was getting tired, so even though I wanted to talk about her insight into this matter, I knew I had to drop it. At least until the morning.

"Well, we will have to call Auntie Alice and Miss Bella tomorrow morning, won't we? I'm thinking that you don't know what that means, right?" I asked hopefully as my daughter pondered the definition of the statement. If she knew what I meant, I would have to sit down with my sister and her friend to talk about a filtration system.

"Nope," she informed me. Thank God the innocence of my one and only daughter had not been corrupted completely, although if this was what Maddy was saying after her once a week with her aunt, I would hate to hear the things Anthony was reciting. I swear, the boy was like a Mr. Clean, Magic Eraser; rub him against a surface - or rather, leave him with a corrupting influence for too long - and he would be marked permanently by whoever he was with.

"Good. Now let's get some sleep, sweetie." I clicked off the light as Maddy snuggled closer to me and prayed that our dreams would not be filled with "flaming homosexuals" with "raging hard-ons".

Some people might be confused about the song choice for Bella's point of view. The song was to show that she couldn't escape the people who tore her down no matter where she is. So, how was it? Everything you ever dreamed of and more? Tell me what you thought in a review!