A/N: All things Twilight belong to Stephenie Meyer. I own nothing except the contents of my imagination and a nearly-new Dell Studio notebook computer.

At first, I'd hated Bella Swan. I admit it.

I hated how she disrupted my life, my family's life, and I hated how she'd captivated Edward. I hated that a human, an ordinary human girl, had so much power over my brother. He'd do anything for her. Absolutely anything. All she had to do was crook her finger, and he'd go running to her side.

She had the kind of power I'd wanted over men, when I was human. And she was completely unaware of it. I hated that about her.

I thought she was ordinary, weak, ignorant, and I knew that I was infinitely prettier, stronger, and smarter than her. It should have been a simple thing, to scare her away from my family.

But it wasn't. "I could become the meal," she'd said, knowing the risk she posed to our family, knowing that if nature—our nature, that we worked so hard to suppress—took its course, she'd die, and we'd be exposed. And that didn't seem to scare her at all. Stupid human girl, she took the risk, embraced it, and I watched in disbelief and disgust as my brother embraced her, embraced the danger to us all.

I was dragged into the charade by Carlisle and Esme's desire to see Edward happy. I had to admit that with the human in his life, my brother was…different. Something in him responded to the fragile girl. He laughed in a way none of us had ever heard, not even Carlisle who'd known him best and longest. With the girl, Edward was both more relaxed than we'd ever seen him, and more tense, but in a different way. He was…focused. Focused completely on her, the clumsy girl whose every move screamed "breakable!"

She was a disaster waiting to happen.

The whole thing with the nomads, the tracker James fixating on my brother, wanting to hurt him through the girl, was quite predictable, I thought. Not that anyone had listened to me. At best, she was a vulnerability, and we couldn't afford vulnerabilities. She was Edward's one weakness, and the tracker honed in on it—on her—the moment he saw the two of them together.

I would gladly have handed her over to him, if it would have kept the rest of us safe. But it wouldn't. Edward would do anything to protect her. "Bella is with Edward. She's part of this family now," Carlisle insisted. "And we protect our family."

Damn it. I didn't want her to be part of my family. Why couldn't anyone else see what I did, that she could destroy Edward—destroy us all—just by being what she was. A fragile, mortal human. Worse, even more prone than most humans to accident and injury.

I never knew exactly what happened in Arizona. I'd stayed behind with Esme, while Edward, Carlisle and Emmett joined Jasper and Alice in Phoenix. Emmett told me about it later, but I found it impossible to believe. There was no way Edward could have done what they claimed he did…to actually drink her blood, to swallow it, and yet save her life, not drain her, and not turn her. Even Carlisle didn't have that kind of restraint.

When they brought her back, when I saw her again, I had a moment where…well, I vividly remember the end of my human life. The bruises on her body, the fractured ribs and broken leg, they made me remember what it felt like to be beaten, damaged, ruined.

I hated her for that too.

I hated her for the fact that her eyes didn't hold the pain they should have held, nor the fear. No, the stupid human girl, when she looked at my brother, complete adoration and trust was in her gaze. She really didn't understand at all. He was going to be the death of her, and she of him, and him of our family.

I avoided her after that. I could do nothing to stop the train wreck, but I didn't have to watch it. I wouldn't watch it.

Alice had other ideas. She was determined to continue the ridiculous charade between our family and the human in our midst. She really seemed to believe that somehow there could be a happy ending.

Nobody knows better than I that there are no happy endings.

It was no surprise to me that Alice's birthday party for the human turned into a disaster. No surprise that Jasper broke under the strain of being forced to smell fresh human blood. No surprise that Edward, in his obsession to protect the unprotectable, made it all worse by injuring the clumsy girl further.

I hated her for Jasper's humiliation and guilt, and by extension the unhappiness it brought Alice (though my sister insisted on worrying about the future of the girl, as if that even mattered). I hated her for the pain in Esme's eyes as she saw Edward tearing himself up over the inevitable, and the pain in Carlisle's as he saw his family breaking apart. I hated her for the fact that my Emmett couldn't laugh this off, the way he did so many things.

I hated her for the agony on Edward's face, when he finally came to his senses and decided—far too late—to put an end to the charade.

She was finally out of his life. Out of my life. Out of my family's life. And this ought to have made me very, very happy indeed.

It didn't.

Edward left us. I couldn't lie to myself. He was…broken. Whatever that silly human girl had brought out in him, whatever she'd given him, it was gone now, and he wasn't the way he'd been before she'd stumbled into our lives. It hurt to be around him, to see how empty and emotionless he'd become. It was actually a relief when he left, under the excuse of tracking Victoria. We all knew he was no tracker, but really, if he was going to be miserable, and make us all miserable with him, better he spend time tracking and getting his head together.

Time would heal him. We had infinite time, and eventually the human girl would age and die, the way they all did, and Edward would perceive her the way we did every human who'd incidentally crossed our paths over the decades. A mere pause, a footnote, in the eternity of our lives.

His absence didn't help things at home. Esme grieved and Carlisle mourned. Alice became uncharacteristically quiet, and whatever visions she might have had she kept to herself. Jasper avoided all of us save Alice, and I wondered at times if he'd leave too. Not that he should have felt guilty, far from it. He'd done nothing but demonstrate once and for all why a human girl could never be part of our family.

And Emmett, well, honestly, I'd always said that his sense of humor drove me crazy. When he no longer made his obnoxious jokes, when he didn't have Edward to mercilessly tease, I missed that. A lot.

And I hated the human girl for that, too.

It was a relief, an enormous relief, when Alice finally shared a vision with us all. The girl was dead. She'd thrown herself off a cliff. When I heard that, I wondered if she'd got the idea from Esme. The shock and horrified empathy on Esme's face showed that she thought the same thing.

It was finally over though. Edward could come home. My family could be put back together again, the way it was before. The way it should be. And finally I could do what it took to make the right thing happen.

One phone call. A few words. My brother would know it was over, know the girl was gone, know that it was time to come home.

Except that it didn't work out that way.

I, better than anyone, ought to have known that there are no happy endings.

When I realized what Edward had chosen to do, that he'd decided to end his life, I would have done anything—anything—to stop him. This was not what I'd planned, not what I'd wanted, not what I'd expected. This was worse than anything I'd imagined.

I could not hate the girl for this.

She did what I could not do. What I could not imagine doing. And she wasn't stupid, nor weak, nor ignorant when she did it. She took her fragile, irresistible, mortal human body to Italy, to face the Volturi. She stopped Edward from committing suicide. She begged Aro for Edward's life. She offered her own in exchange for his.

And she meant it. Every word.

Improbably, impossibly, the Volturi listened to her. Listened to Alice, who swore Bella would become one of us, who showed Aro a vision of it.

And Edward came home again.

I could not hate her for that. I could never hate Bella again. She would be part of our family. I could see that now, could see how Edward simply could not survive without her. Could see how she made him complete, the way Esme completed Carlisle, the way Alice and Jasper fit together, and the way Emmett made me feel whole.

I tried to explain to Bella though, why I had to vote against her becoming immortal like us. I could see that my words were useless. She didn't understand what this life meant. Just as she'd ignored the danger, she was now ignoring the cost. She would be changed, it was inevitable, and there was nothing more I could do about that.

So, it would be up to all of us, including me, to keep Bella safe until Edward finally changed her.

I could do that. I would do that.

I knew he'd give her anything she wanted. But her request, to stay human through the wedding, through the wedding night…I wanted to beat my head against the wall when I heard of that idiocy. She'd never survive it. And killing her, the way Edward was certain to do, would destroy my brother.

I had one more chance to warn her. One more chance to get it right. To show her the reality of our world, and make it count. This time though, I would do it not because I hated Bella, but because I cared too much about my family…my brother…and my brother's mate, to let the inevitable happen.

I had a plan. And this time it would work. Just once, there had to be a happy ending.

A/N: Yes, there will be a second part to this story. Will Rosalie learn anything from trying yet again to make things happen the way she thinks they ought?