Disclaimer: Not mine.

Author's Note: I have noticed that people don't seem to be all too interested in this story, and I guess I sort of get that. Not exactly fast food. And also, althought I hope this is not the reason, I might be doing some spelling mistakes. Sorry, I am not a native English speaker, far from.

Thanks for those who have reviewed though!

All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?

- Immanuel Kant

EDWARD'S POV

Once we had calmed down we descended to the living room to talk. It felt better when there was more space - it was easier to be calm when the settings weren't quite so intimate.

"What do you intend to do?" She asked me.

You must help me, her thoughts said. I looked into her eyes intently.

"I swear, I will. Just... I don't know how. And I don't know what I should do."

She considered this for a moment. I had already told her everything that had happened to me since Bella's fateful birthday, and everything Charlie had told me. I knew it had been painful for her to hear some of the things I was telling, because so much of it was attached to her personal loss. But she had listened anyway, her brain trying to find solutions, come up with plans. I saw, in her eyes, all the visions she had seen.

Most of it was about Jasper - she was his constant companion, following his every step. I wondered in my mind why he had even bothered to not take her with him - surely he knew she would follow him in her visions. But perhaps he, too, had been selfish. Perhaps it indeed had been easier for him to cope with his emotions when he didn't have hers to carry, too. I couldn't blame his selfishness and I knew Alice didn't hold it against him either. When he would eventually come back she would welcome him with open arms.

"I know," she said, her voice strong. "You have to find Bella and sort out things with her, and then we will go and find Jasper, and everything will be fine again."

God, I sound like a child that insists upon something, I heard her think. I didn't comment on her thoughts.

"Have you seen something about Bella? Anything?" I asked in a hopeful tone of voice. She gave me a dirty look and I knew why. I had specifically asked her to not look out for her.

"No, I haven't," she answered, biting her lip. "But not why you think... When Jasper disappeared, I looked."

I shot her a furious glance. "But you promised you wouldn't!"

"Oh, you're one to talk, you who just asked me like a puppy waiting for a bone, if I've seen anything!" She threw back at me. We stared at each other like cats ready for a fight for a moment, and then I leaned back in my chair.

"Sorry. Just tell me."

"As I was saying, when Jasper disappeared, I looked. I was determined to find her and drag her to you and force you to get back together - " she held her hand up when I opened my mouth to scold her - "so that I would get my Jasper back. But the thing is, I couldn't see anything!"

I stared at her.

"What do you mean, you couldn't see anything?" I asked her, my mind blank.

"I mean that I looked and I looked and I looked and I couldn't see anything! Nada - absolutely nothing!" She sounded irritated and I could sense she felt ashamed, too. Alice didn't like not knowing things.

"Why do you think that is?" I asked her, my voice shaking. I felt how my entire already-feeble-enough plan was dissolving into the air. How could I ever find her if Alice couldn't see her? I thought of the millions of people living in this country - they were like ants in a huge nest. How could I find one ant among millions of others? How could I ever reach her before it was too late and she would end up getting hurt?

"I don't know!" She said, frustrated. "It's like something is blocking me - I know she's there, behind the darkness, but I can't reach her!"

"What if - what if she's...dead?" I whispered, my mouth barely moving, the horrible possibility slipping in to my mind for the first time. I thought of all the ways she could die - car crash, an angry werewolf, a mugger, a lightning, a fire, a serial-killer, alcohol-poisoning, fall from a hotel window... I felt weak and realized I had started shaking.

"Calm down, Edward," Alice said, lowering her hand on my arm. "I'll not lie to you - that's what I thought at first. And I decided that I would never, ever tell you. But then I compared - I tried to see other people, people that I knew to be dead. And it's different. No, she's definetely there somewhere, it's just that she's...vanished."

I tried to calm myself down, scanning her thoughts. She seemed honest enough - she didn't seem to be blocking me or hiding anything.

"But you have seen her once!" I exclaimed suddenly, scanning her thoughts.

"Yes, but that one doesn't count," she said, seeming a bit embarrassed about her slip. I understood why she would feel embarrassed and in normal situations I would never ever look into her thoughts, catching a glimpse like this. But this was an exeption.

Bella in her vision was about to take a shower - she had a towel wrapped around herself and she was standing in a dimly-lit bathroom, digging through soaps and shampoos in her little dirty yellow toiletry bag. There was a pair of sharp scissors and she injured herself a little, drawing in a sharp breath when the metal scratched her finger. She pulled her hand out of the bag and I saw a small drop of blood gush from the cut - she put the finger under the tap and let the blood run into the sink among the water, holding her breath.

That was it. The only contact I had had with Bella in so long, the only real proof she was alive still - alive and still hazardous. I couldn't help but to smile a bit sadly, thinking of the many times she had most likely involuntarily hurt herself during the time we had been apart.

Oh Bella, it would've been so much better for you to not fall in love with a vampire, I thought. And briefly again I felt as if I had done the right thing by leaving, before the situation crashed back down on me.

"But this means that you can see her sometimes," I said to her. "When did you see this?"

"About a week ago," she admitted. "But I have tried so hard to see her for three weeks, and this was the only thing I got in all that time. I can't control it at all."

She hung her head, ashamed again.

"Just keep looking," I encouraged. "I'll try to think of something else. The problem is, she seems to have gone to the South, which obviously makes it harder for us to follow."

Something was nagging at me in the corner of my mind - what had I not taken into consideration? I was missing something.

Alice snorted.

"That's typical. Why would she go to the South? Is she trying to make it harder for us to find her?" She said, irritated.

The nagging sound was stronger in my head - what was it? Something I had heard very recently. Something that would make all the pieces fit.

But my head was too full of things that had happened in such a short period of time - I was going through everything but nothing fit quite right. I felt as if I wasn't seeing the forest because there were too many trees in the way.

"I need to hunt."

BELLA'S POV

Today was more difficult. Perhaps because we had kissed last night, or perhaps because we had finally made plans - something we had tried to avoid doing up until now. Well, no matter what the reason was, today was difficult.

Today, he was with me constantly.

I wasn't looking, of course. I didn't allow myself the luxury any longer.

Jake liked these kind of days. Not because I was unhappy - I don't think he was aware that I was - but because on days like this, I was very clingy. Nothing seemed to please him more than when I demanded us to stop simply because I wanted to snuggle up to him, to have him wrap his arms around me and hold me in his warmth. Hold me so that I didn't need to clutch at the hole in my chest.

And now that we had surpassed yet another gray area in our relationship, he seemed more pleased than ever when I let him kiss me. I sometimes wondered how this has actually happened. I had been so certain that our relationship would always remain just friendly and yet without me even noticing it had turned to something so much more.

I guess it had been unavoidable. Maybe I never even had a chance. Just like I never even had a chance on not falling in love with.. the other one.

I never named him in my thoughts.

But on days like these he was all I could think about. Even when I felt the blazing heat of Jacob's body press against me, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I should be holding something way less warm. And that the lips that claimed mine should be the ones that made me burn - because that's what his lips had done; they had burned me until there was nothing left. Just ashes and a few weak sparkles left.

And those sparkles were the ones Jacob so gladly accepted, trying to make them flame again with his own fire. But there was simply nothing left to light up, nothing but some cinders and the false promise.

Or that's what it felt like on days like these.

On some other days I felt that maybe, just maybe, there was something else left to give him. Maybe I could be... not exactly Bella, but his Bells. Someone else, someone who could make him happy. I didn't care much for my own happiness, because I knew I could never be completely whole anymore. But he simply needed to be happy - how could he be my personal sun if he was unhappy?

And that's why we had to go to Phoenix. Because in Phoenix nobody could hurt us. I hoped.

I wrapped my arms tighter around Jake. We were lying in the back of the Rabbit, just having eaten sandwiches for lunch. Maybe it would be a good thing, this moving in together in Phoenix. At least we would have proper food, I was thinking. It got tiresome after a while to be always living on toast, coke, sandwiches and pizzas.

"Are you looking forwards to it?" Jake asked me, his voice hoarse in my hair.

"What?"

"Living together." He sounded very emotional.

"Yes. I think it will be a good thing," I said almost truthfully. He started giving me little kisses on my hair, trailing a way down to my forehead and my cheeks, finally kissing my lips. I laughed and tried to half-heartedly push him away.

He was so eager to jump into this new life with me and I couldn't help but to love him for it. How could I resist his devotion? Did I ever think I had a chance? Yes, it should and it would be a good thing, Phoenix.

But deep down I knew I was fooling myself. Everything might work out and we could even be relatively happy.

But we could never be completely safe.

CHARLIE'S POV

I didn't know what to think about Cullen's visit when I woke up the following morning. For a while I was tempted to brush the whole thing aside as an alcohol-infused dream (I had continued drinking after he had left) - but I found his card from the kitchen table and sat down, staring at it for a very long time. I sat until I realized that it was too cold in the kitchen and I had to get up to close the window which I noticed I had left slightly ajar.

I checked my answering machine. There was a message from Renée, her tired voice asking me, the way she asked me every other day, if I had heard anything from Bella. I decided to answer later. I think she sometimes preferred to not be answered straight away, maybe to prolong the sense of hope. And there was not a lot of hope these days.

I didn't want to break the news to her, but in cases like these the searches would end quite soon - as a rule, if the people who were missing weren't found within one month, they would never be found. The trace would eventually grow cold.

And they had been away for over a month now. It had been nearly two weeks since the last sighting.

I rubbed my temples. It was hard for me to accept both as a police officer as well as a father, that perhaps there simply wasn't anything I could do. Perhaps I should just try to get used to the thought that I might never see her again.

I thought of Cullen again. He had seemed strangely convinced that he could help me. I was highly dubious, but I would gladly accept any glimpse of hope I could find - no matter how unlikely. Or no matter from how unlikely sources.

I didn't like Cullen. It wasn't just the way he had treated Bella - there was something about him that I just didn't like. I had never spent much time alone with him and when I had he had always been very polite towards me - he was from a good family, it was clear he had had a good upbringing - but underneath it all I felt there was something that I didn't like. I reflected upon the feeling, trying to come up with answers.

I remembered the uneasy feeling that had possessed me when I had first seen him standing in the darkness of my porch, and later when he had been standing behind me in the living room. In my beer-affected mind it had been easier to admit it than it was now - I was intimidated by him. I couldn't help but to think now that had I spent a little more time with him, perhaps I would have been less tolerant of him spending time with Bella in the first place.

But nothing made sense. The boy was 18, for crying out loud. In my head I was judging him as if he were a man. I certainly wouldn't be analysing Mike Newton's character this deeply, even if he happened to date Bella. Which I wouldn't really mind, to be frank.

But then again, if Bella were to come back and show any eagerness to date, I would undoubtably let her choose whomever she wanted, be it Newton, Jake or fricking Alice Cullen, as long as she would stay. And actually, I mused while trying to find a pan from the top-left yellow cupboard, I would way rather have Alice in the family than her brother.

What the hell am I thinking? I thought, finding the pan. I really need to stop drinking. I don't do hang-overs well.

I started boiling water for my instant-coffee, still trembling in the cool morning air, briefly wondering when I had opened the kitchen window in the first place.

A/N: Hmm... so far I am very pleased with the story myself. The plot is sort of opening up to me while I write. But I already know where this is going. Pls review! :)