A/N: Turns out my Thursdays are looking rather busy, so Wednesday is going to be posting day from here on out! Enjoy.

Edward POV

My kids and I were sitting around the dining room table, eating breakfast. Sarah was lost in her head, as usual, playing a word puzzle game on her tablet and picking gingerly at her dry breakfast cereal. No milk—Sarah can't abide any food that is mushy. Billy and I were sharing a bowl of oatmeal. At one year old, he liked indulging his newfound independence, and he refused to let me spoon his food into his mouth. As a result, there was more oatmeal on the floor and in his hair than in his belly, but he was happy, so it was all right with me.

I ate another spoonful of my own oatmeal, relishing the taste of cinnamon on my tongue. Even though I'd been able to consume food for a while now, it was still a wonder to me. The act of eating was a novel feeling, one that I doubted I would ever take for granted again. One hundred years of thinking you'd never eat again would do that to a person.

In truth, I was more human than vampire at that point. Still unexplained after three pregnancies, all I knew for sure was that my babies, and the man who helped create them, had given me a second chance at life. With each subsequent child, my skin had become duller and softer, which left me looking more human. While I was still attractive to look at, I no longer stood out in a crowd as somehow otherworldly. I still needed blood every few months, but I mostly got by on human food. It seemed that growing life inside me had kick started my organ functions, so I was more or less a real boy again.

I was even beginning to show signs of aging, albeit very slowly. I probably looked more like a nineteen year old than a seventeen year old now. Helpful when you were carting around a five and one year old. When we noticed I was growing slightly older, Jacob stopped phasing; he didn't want to outlive me. We decided to let life take its natural course, growing old and eventually accepting death as a necessity in the circle of life.

Watching Baby Billy play with his food made me miss my eldest son terribly. My little family lived in a town just north of Boston, but Anthony still lived in Oregon with Leah and the rest of our extended family. We had to move here for Sarah's autism treatments—there was little other choice. Massachusetts was one of the best states for special needs care. The distance from our family was helped by the fact the Boston area was very accepting of two gay men raising two small children. Most of the time, no one even blinked an eye at our family. Not for that reason, anyway. They stared when Sarah had meltdowns. But that was a whole other thing.

Jacob and I were on our own out here, all the way across the country from the ones who loved us. While Carlisle had bought a house in the Berkshire Mountains to have a landing pad close to us, he still spent most of his time on the compound in Oregon. He was the King of all vampire kind, so there was no helping that. I did wish I could see him more though. I missed my father's unconditional love and support. I still had it, of course. It was just really far away.

Before Sarah was born, I was an integral part of his operation; Carlisle's right-hand man, you might say. My mind-reading abilities played a key role in the building of his empire, and for that I was proud to have been of service. But with each new child, my mind, like my body, became more and more human. I could no longer hear a cacophony of voices in my head. I didn't know what people were thinking all the time anymore. If I concentrated really hard, I could get bits and pieces—fragments of thought. Sometimes the fragments made sense, sometimes they didn't, kind of like overhearing a conversation from a distance. You catch some things, miss others. For me, it was a beneficial side effect of the births. I always hated hearing everyone's thoughts constantly. My babies had freed me.

Back when we still lived on the compound, I hadn't been hidden away during my pregnancy with Sarah. Pretty much every vampire on Earth knew about the circumstances surrounding Anthony's birth—a war was fought against the Volturi over it, after all. I was happy to have the freedom to move about the compound as I pleased and help Carlisle with the goings-on around the camp, but Carlisle's acceptance of me didn't stop the vitriolic thoughts of the vampires I passed by every day. Suffice it to say, I heard a lot of chatter in my head about what a freak I was, and how disgusting my relationship with a smelly dog was too. Thankfully, when it came time to give birth to Sarah, Carlisle knew better and gave me Demerol, which made that particular agony a lot more bearable.

Our children were physically strong, and never sick. Anthony had developed at a rapid pace, but Sarah's development was more normally paced. Unfortunately, mine and Jacob's superior, supernatural genes were not enough to save Sarah from autism. The cause of autism was still unknown, but professionals suspected environmental factors. Perhaps it was some chemical used on the compound while Wilhelm was still trying to find the proper formula for synthetic blood. Jacob used to work on the machinery in his lab a lot—maybe he'd inadvertently exposed me and our unborn child to it, whatever it was. In any case, it was pointless to speculate, and we accepted our situation as it was, moving across the country for the best available care for our daughter.

My third pregnancy happened entirely by accident. The consequence of Jacob's heat, you might say. We were used to it by then, though. Carlisle was far away in Oregon, but we knew what to do. I was able to go out and about in baggy clothes until my bump was too big to pass off as a beer belly. Then Jake had to quit the job he loved in the auto shop in order to take Sarah to her therapy appointments. That was when we burned through my savings. Jacob delivered Billy in our bedroom with no anesthetic and Carlisle on the phone, guiding him through. It was a traumatic birth, but a quick one—my body knew what it was doing by that point and Billy shot out of me like a rocket. Good and bad, I suppose. Over quickly, but immensely painful.

When I had recovered enough to handle both kids on my own, Jake found that his boss had given his position to someone else. We had no money left, so he took whatever job he could find—a phone operator at a collections agency. A trying and stressful job to be sure. And that's when the strain on our marriage began.

Suddenly, I was snapped out of my thoughts by a sharp poke in my arm. I looked over at my daughter, and her luminous brown eyes stared back at me, wide, bright and questioning.

"So, you're the mommy then, right?" she asked bluntly.

Thrown by the randomness of her question, my eyebrows knitted together as I considered what she was asking. Sarah stared intently back at me, awaiting her answer.

Does she think I'm a girl? I bit my lip and replied, "Umm, well, no. I'm a daddy."

"Yeah," she conceded—at least she realized I was male. "But you stay home with me and take me to all my appointments and cook and clean. So, you're a mommy."

"Mama!" Billy shouted gleefully, flinging oatmeal to the floor.

My heart sank. She was right, after all. I was the mommy. But I wished I weren't. I couldn't help but feel emasculated. Everyone already thought I was pretty and more feminine than my mate, but I didn't want to be called Mommy. Somehow it made me feel weaker, less than Jake. It was bad enough everyone in our life knew I was the bottom most of the time. Not that I would change that, but I'd rather other people not think about it. It was uncomfortable for me at best.

After a few moments of wallowing, I shrugged and reluctantly agreed with Sarah. "Yeah, I guess I am."

Sarah just smiled brightly at me before returning to her tablet game.

I wasn't quite sure how to feel about that exchange. She usually didn't ask any questions about anything, not even "Can I have milk?" It was always "I want milk." Her brain ran too fast for her to keep up and pin down what she needed to speak properly, I knew from experience. What I heard may have been fragments, but it was enough to know that her mind either flitted from one thing to the next like a hummingbird, or would be dead focused on something for an hour or more. So I never bothered with trying to instill politeness or teaching her to speak properly. I was just happy she was able to speak at all, as she didn't speak more than two words until she was four and a half years old.

My phone made an obnoxious pinging sound and my shoulders sank even lower. Reluctantly, I checked my instant messenger.

Jacob: I hate this job.

Evidently, Jacob was having a bad day at work. Again. I had no idea how to reply. I could say "Sorry," but experience told me Jacob didn't want pity. I really didn't have time for a long diatribe, so I couldn't ask about what had happened to make him say that. Finally, I decided on...

Edward: I know.

Jacob: I mean, these people are the worst. All these people we have to call and badger about repayments, they're all so sad and pathetic. And the people here, some of them actually seem to get off on harassing these losers. I can't take it.

Well, it looked like I was getting the diatribe whether I asked for it or not.

It was going to be a long afternoon.

A/N: I know it's a short one, but it's a setup chapter. The others are longer. Please leave a review; reviews are fuel!