Disclaimer: Stephenie Meyer owns all things Twilight. I own the Penguin Classics edition of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, a set of lacy grey scanties, the premise of this story and all of the carrots, cabbage, tomatoes, turnips, potatoes, onions and leeks needed to make my favorite vegetable soup.
Many thanks to Serendipitous, my lovely, talented and funny beta. You're the best, bb.
The three-story glass-and-timber house looked like it belonged in some post-modern snow globe: a perfect house surrounded by perfect trees. A perfect tree fort perched on one of the branches, a perfect tire swing hanging from another. Next to a perfect pergola in a perfect flower garden. Edward could almost feel the globe in his hands. He wanted to shake it until dollar bills floated up then settled on all of it like tainted snowflakes.
But the cold smoothness in his hands was a wet rock from the riverbank. Edward threw it in the water and watched the moonlight ripple across the broken surface. Nights had always been the worst. He saw ghosts of Bella everywhere, and though he hadn't laid eyes on her in ten years, he knew she was in Forks this weekend. Jessica Newton made sure of that, practically shouting it to the cashier two lanes down from hers at the grocery store. When he felt Jessica's eyes on him, evaluating his reaction, Edward had schooled his face into impassiveness. He was good at it, very good—and it had made him a fortune.
It was amazing the skills you could master when you didn't sleep.
Edward picked up a small, flat stone and threw. It skipped across the surface before sinking to the riverbed just shy of the opposite bank. He ached to sit at his piano. But Alice was asleep in her old bedroom, and Edward didn't want to wake her. Their relationship had been, at best, strained since Bella's eighteenth birthday. Since he left for college, he only saw his family at command performances—weddings, graduations, christenings. Even then, he and Alice avoided each other. It was easier that way. So why had Alice come?
The trees cast sharp shadows in the moonlight on the opposite bank, and no wind stirred, but Edward could have sworn he saw movement. He rose to his feet, standing on a huge, flat rock that jutted out over the water. Perhaps he was just remembering. The years had begun to cloud his memories of Bella. Sometimes, for brief moments, he couldn't recall whether a particular memory was from a dream or something that really happened.
Edward silently let himself into the house via the patio door from the kitchen. He looked back at the river and thought about the meadow.
He hadn't been back there since the night of the graduation party. Since he last looked into Bella's eyes.
He slipped off his shoes and padded through the kitchen to the great room. After running a hand over the smooth slanted lid of his baby grand, he sat at the bench. His fingers soundlessly ghosted over the keys, his eyes closing as he listened within for a melody he'd once created but never written down. It was for Bella, about Bella—a lullaby to soothe away the nightmares he witnessed on nights he snuck in through her window in the months after his betrayal. He hadn't permitted himself to play it for years, and now feared it was, like so much else, lost to him. But the melody he composed during those awful nights sitting in the rocking chair watching her thrash and call for him played in his head though the room remained silent.
When the last note of the lullaby faded, he opened his eyes on the scene beyond the floor-to-ceiling window and saw her. She stood at his car with the door open. She pulled something from her hair and it cascaded down around her shoulders. Then she bent to write.
Edward sat, transfixed by his hallucination. He had them when insomnia kept him awake for days at a time, but no previous hallucination had given him a clear view of Bella. She was always maddeningly out of sight.
Tonight, the moonlight poured over her, and he could see her hair, shorter and straighter, and her cheek, lit by moonlight. Her hands as they folded something. Her lips as she kissed something else then placed it in his car. And finally, her whole face as she looked up at the house, her eyes luminous and still, after all these years, silently questioning.
Then she turned and walked down the driveway. It wasn't until she tripped slightly over a tree root that Edward realized she wasn't another hallucination. Bella was here at—he pulled his phone from his pocket and checked—four-eighteen in the morning. And she was walking away.
He stood, frozen, watching her go. She squared her shoulders as she walked, as if she were settling something within herself. It struck his exhausted mind as the sort of gesture Eve might have made when she finally turned her back on the closed gates of Eden. He was still standing there half an hour later when a hand on his arm startled him.
"Couldn't sleep?"
Edward shook his head and looked down at her. The dark circles under Alice's eyes told him she hadn't either. She nodded and turned toward the kitchen.
Edward opened the front door and descended the steps in bare feet. Now that day was dawning, it didn't seem real. He had to know for sure. He went around and opened the driver's door.
The worn velvet box sat on a folded piece of paper with a corner torn off of it. His knees buckled and he had to sit down on the bare dirt of the driveway.
For all the ways he had wronged Bella, the locket was the one thing he'd gotten right. He meant what he'd written; it had been his only truth. The single act he could never, despite what followed, bring himself to regret. What he saw in Bella's eyes that day, as he pressed into her sun-warmed body amid the tall grass in the meadow, made him believe that her love could redeem him.
He'd given Bella his heart that day. Finding it under the floorboard in her old bedroom all those years ago had comforted him. She kept his heart, or what remained of it, with her most treasured possessions. Knowing it was safe with Bella had helped him face each miserable step away from her.
But now it was back. She'd given it back. Edward couldn't bring himself to touch the box or the paper beneath it until Alice emerged from the house with two coffee mugs in hand. Then he shoved both into the pocket of his jeans and stood.
Edward mounted the stairs and took the mug Alice held out for him. He sipped at the coffee and watched her watching him. He wanted to fidget under her gray gaze, but resisted by initiating safe conversation. "When is your flight?"
It was Alice's turn to squirm. "About that." She hesitated and blew on her coffee without meeting his eyes.
"About what? I thought you had a flight this afternoon."
Alice set her mug on the porch railing, which she grasped with both hands. "I've asked Sam to come out and look over the Porsche. I have some business in Seattle, and I'll be here for a few weeks. I'd like to use the house as home base if you don't mind."
"What business, Alice?" His tone was as grim. This violated all of their unspoken rules.
"Personal business." Alice turned away without meeting his eyes and went back in the house.
Fuck.
Edward finished his own coffee and Alice's, wincing at the sweetener she'd added to hers. Then he sat on the porch swing Tanya's parents had occupied that fateful day. Eleazar's stare was the first thing he'd noticed when he and Bella emerged from the woods, and his first impulse was to pretend she wasn't important. To protect her. He hadn't seen Tanya coming until she was wrapped around him like the succubus she turned out to be.
Succubus. It wasn't fair to call her that. He'd played his part—all too well.
Alice worried him. She hadn't brought Jasper along, which was rare. Could she really be having personal problems?
He looked through the open front door and saw no sign of Alice, so he slid his hand in his pocket and withdrew the paper and the locket.
He sat the box on his knee and opened the letter.
What he read gutted him.
The one good thing he'd given Bella, and Tanya had ruined it. All these years, Bella had believed he regretted giving it to her. And that his parents wanted it back.
Lies. Maybe Tanya was a succubus after all.
No. Just a girl misled by her family, her ambitions, and promises Edward should never have made.
He stood and gathered the coffee mugs while assembling his game face. He didn't know what Alice was up to, but feared her good intentions more than almost anything else.
Inside, they ate breakfast without conversation. By the time they'd finished loading the dishwasher, Sam was knocking at the front door.
Edward escaped to his bedroom on the third floor. He took the box from his pocket and set it on the nightstand, suddenly and overwhelmingly exhausted. He stripped off his jeans and shirt and slid under the covers before picking up the velvet box. He stroked its worn lid then opened it.
The locket lay on its pillow, the chain pooled behind it. Edward stroked the gold heart with his fingertip, remembering how it shone against Bella's chest in the sunlight.
He needed to see it—the piece of paper with his one true promise. His hands, usually so dexterous and elegant, struggled. His thumbnails were too short to open the locket, but at last he managed it.
A folded piece of paper tumbled out onto his bare chest as he sat propped against his headboard. It looked wrong, torn at one edge and lined. He'd carefully cut the piece of blank stationery he used. He unfolded the scrap and read two devastating words.
Edward threw off the covers and staggered to the bathroom, certain his breakfast was coming back up, but it didn't. His dry heaves devolved into loud, gulping, tearless sobs.
In the ten years since he left Forks, Edward had never stopped loving Bella, never stopped wanting her, and wanting her happiness even more. For the first time ever, there on the floor of his bathroom, he cried for his losses, for all the ways he'd brought them on himself, and above all for failing Bella.
When he woke later, he was stiff from being curled up on the tile. He still clutched the tiny paper in his fist.
Edward hurried down to the first floor. Alice had to know where Bella was. He had repeatedly forbidden her to keep tabs on Bella, but she most likely had anyway.
He searched the lower level and was about to head back up to check Alice's bedroom when he saw the open garage door. Alice's car was gone.
Edward took both flights of stairs two steps at a time and retrieved his phone from the pocket of his discarded jeans.
He flipped it open and tapped out: Where are you?
Moments later, his phone beeped. You can't stop me this time.
He sank onto the leather couch in his bedroom and slid his hand into a carefully concealed slit in one of the back cushions. He withdrew two wrinkled letters and set them on the nightstand beside Bella's note from this morning and the scrap of paper from the locket. Then he tapped his keys again. Come back. There's something you need to see.
A/N: To everyone who has already reviewed, thank you. It means so much to me when you take the time to share your thoughts about the story.
So… *blinks at you with great big puppy eyes* … maybe you'd be kind enough to review this chapter?
I hear Edward slow-dances with each reviewer. It's only a rumor, but you wouldn't want to miss out, would you?
A shout out to the Ladies of the UoEM Thread: the way you support and encourage each other touches my heart. Thanks for taking me under your wing. *curtsies to the slore sisterhood*
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