William returned the next morning as soon as there was activity on the ground floor of the house. I was with Nessie, standing near a window, and we watched as William appeared, stood some distance from the house and apparently considered standing and calling to us from there. Then, as if struck with a surprising new idea, he proceeded to the front door and rang the bell. Nessie ran to answer it.

"Hi, William."

"Hello, lass. Well, knocking at a friend's door is an experience I've not had for a many a long year. It is a welcome one, to be sure." He saw Nessie sorting through some paperwork. "Perhaps you are busy at the moment."

"No, Nessie's just getting ready for school," I told him.

"Indeed! So you attend a real school, among the human children."

"Yes, only they're not children. It's high school."

"Of course. My apologies."

Nessie slipped her hand into mine a moment, showing me William from her perspective. She found him funny and unusual, and liked the way he talked. She felt at ease around him.

Edward entered the room, greeted William warmly, and after some pleasantries suggested trying their hand at music. He sat down at the piano and took out a wide selection of sheet music for William to choose from. William opened his violin case and took out the instrument with great care, tuned it, lovingly rosined his bow, and turned to examine the choices Edward had set out.

"Let us start gradually, shall we?" William suggested. "I have not played with another musician for a century and a half or so." He started by playing snatches of folk tunes, on which Edward accompanied him; then Edward played bits of simple piano music and William followed him.

"I believe we are ready to make the leap," William said at last. "What about this?" He offered the music to Le Cygne, and they played it through. Even to my untrained ear, William's playing was wonderful, perfectly accurate yet filled with his own personality.

The rest of the family applauded from various points around the house. Edward looked quite energized by the experience. "Why not let Nessie take a turn?" he suggested. "She has to leave before long."

Nessie sat down at the piano, and they performed a duet. Then William asked Nessie to play something simple, anything she chose, so he could practice impromptu accompaniment. She played a waltz, and after listening for a few bars, William joined her, ornamenting the piece perfectly. They received more applause from the family, who had begun to gather closer, and Jacob, who had stopped in to say goodbye to Nessie.

"Oh, this is nice! The music sounds so much better this way than with the piano alone."

She prepared to start playing another piece, but I stopped her. "Nessie, we have to go." I turned to William. "Sorry, but she has to get to school."

"Yeah, Nessie," Jacob said, "if you delay any more, your mom'll have to exceed the speed limit to get you there on time." He grinned at me. Yes, I'd finally acquired the Cullen taste for fast driving, although I tried not to indulge it when Nessie was in the car.

Nessie said goodbye, grabbed her books and her mostly-for-show lunch, threw on an entirely-for-show winter coat, and skipped out the back door toward the cars. We took my 'everyday' car, an Aston Martin Cygnet that Edward had bought me. I had actually requested it by name, and even expressed a strong preference for a particular custom colour, all of which made him giddy with happiness. He liked the fact that it was an Aston Martin and various aspects of its engine construction that were of no interest to me, but he found the price - merely very expensive rather than insanely extravagant - and lack of racing potential a concession on his part. I liked the fact that it didn't stand out like a tiara at a bowling alley, and the pale celadon green paint, but the cherry on top was the fact that its name means Swan.

We headed down the long gravel drive leading off the Cullen property and onto a dirt road. "That William's nice," Nessie commented. "And he's a really good musician."

"I thought so."

"But why doesn't his wife come in and visit too?"

"He says she's nervous of us."

Nessie didn't reply. She lowered the window on her side of the car and leaned out slightly. "I think that's her." She was pointing, unexpectedly, more or less upwards. "Stop the car a minute, Momma."

"What's going on?" I pulled over. She started to get out of the car, but I stopped her. "Nessie! Where are you going?"

"William's wife. She's up there!" She pointed again, and this time I could smell her before I saw her. She was standing on the branch of a spruce tree, some eighty feet up, mostly hidden by the trunk. "I want to invite her to come see us. Maybe she wouldn't be so nervous if I talked to her a little before she came to the house." She was on her way before I could speak again.

I got out of the car and watched her, debating whether to stop her and bring her back. It didn't seem like a bad idea, and none of us liked having a visitor stand around in the snow by herself. Even if she chose to be there, it felt inhospitable. Nessie was certainly the one to approach her, too: almost everybody, human, werewolf and vampire, liked Nessie on first sight. However, this Mila's behaviour was eccentric enough to worry me a little. I stood near the car, ready to run toward Nessie at the first sign of trouble.

I saw my girl stop a few feet from the tree and look up. Mila was still mostly invisible to me; I could see a hand on the trunk, and a bit of her dark hair. She wasn't either fleeing or leaping down to attack; so far, so good.

"Hi!" Nessie called up to her. "I'm Renesmee, from the big house over there. I was playing piano with William."

"Yes, I could hear you," came a low, musical voice. Well, she didn't sound crazy.

"I hope you'll come and visit soon. We're all getting along with William, and we want to meet you. We won't make you talk if you're shy. Really, my family's very good about that kind of thing."

There was a pause. "All right. Maybe later today."

"Good." I could see Nessie smiling up at her. "I have to go, or I'll be late for school. It was nice meeting you."

"Mila," the voice supplied, although Nessie hadn't asked.

"Nice meeting you, Mila."

"Yes, er, nice meeting you too."

Nessie raced back to the car, grinning, and jumped in the front seat. "That went pretty smoothly," I commented as I drove off. I was just starting to consider what Edward would think about my letting Nessie approach a strange vampire alone.

"Yeah!" She smiled harder. "I hope she does come to the house now. We'll have to tell everybody not to ask her questions right away."

"She didn't seem terribly shy with you."

"No. Maybe she just doesn't like large groups. Could you see her from here?"

"No, she was behind the tree."

"She's really pretty. She has worn out clothes, though, like William. Do you think they'd let us give them new ones?"

"I'm sure Aunt Alice is already looking for an opportunity to do that."

She laughed. "Why didn't you want me to hear what William was talking about last night?"

I sighed. She didn't miss much. "He was going to talk about when he was first changed. For someone like him, without a family or even one friend to help, that time can be very bad."

Her expression became serious. "Did he hunt people?"

"At first, yes. He couldn't help it. Eventually he figured out how not to."

"So he figured it out on his own. Like Grandpa Carlisle."

"Yes."

She stared out the windshield a few minutes. "I remember, when I was a baby, I used to think all vampires were like our family. Then I found out we were really unusual. Grandpa's kind of like..." She put her hand on my arm, showing me a complicated series of images and corresponding emotions. The overall picture was of Carlisle as a visionary, a moral forerunner, one of the world's great reformers whose ideas were ahead of his time.

"Yes, I sometimes think of him that way, but I don't think that's how he sees himself."

"No." She grinned. "It's kind of strange. I don't hold it against William that he hunted human beings, even if I think it's a terrible thing, the worst thing. I even like some of our vampire friends, like Kachiri and Alistair, when I know they hunt humans, and don't even try to stop. I can like them, even when there are parts of them that are exactly what I hate the most. Does that seem weird?"

"I think that's what Grandpa Carlisle would call loving the sinner while hating the sin."

She nodded slowly. "He's said that to me before. I mostly applied it to little things, like people doing something annoying. It's a much bigger idea when you're talking about murder." I was surprised at her use of the word murder. We usually used the morally neutral term, hunting. She was frowning at the dashboard. "That's one of the things Grandpa's better at. Nobody hates killing humans more than Grandpa Carlisle, but he never, ever says anyone else is evil or bad for doing it. At the most, he says they haven't found the right way yet, and even then he only says it to the family in private."

I thought of answering, but I realized this was mostly internal dialogue spoken out loud, and I was just a handy sounding board.

"Most of the kids at school can't make the distinction. Somebody does a bad thing, he's bad. Somebody does a good thing, he's good. It's a lot more complicated than that." I nodded, in case she felt the need for a response. "And if someone's bad, they figure you no longer have to be good to him. Grandpa would probably say you have to be that much better to a bad person. He talked to me about it once..." She seemed to be thinking about a conversation with Carlisle, and fell silent for a moment. She resumed a minute later. "Another time, he heard somebody on TV talking about beating up some people that were causing trouble, saying 'we have to fight fire with fire.' Grandpa said you don't fight fire with fire; you fight fire with water."

"What was it he told you about? If you don't mind my asking."

"Oh, it was because I got mad at somebody at school. It was just like what he said about fire; he told me when you encounter a rockslide, the least helpful thing you can do is throw rocks at it." She giggled at that. "He said other people doing wrong isn't my cue to do more wrong; I have to be even better, to balance things out. Something like that. And he talked to me about keeping my temper. Well, no; he talked about how he manages to keep his temper. I don't think he ever gets really mad, but that's how he always talks. You know: 'When I do this wrong' or 'We sometimes make that kind of mistake', when he's probably never done the wrong thing himself."

"I've noticed. I like your grandpa's way of looking at things."

"I do too, but he's unusual. He loves everybody, almost like Grandma Esme. He even loves people he hates."

"He what?"

"Well, not hates, but people he knows are pretty rotten. Nobody's bad enough for Grandpa to see them as just bad."

"No, I see what you mean."

"If someone tried to hurt Grandma, or any of us, he'd try to stop them. He might fight them, or even kill them, but he wouldn't hate them. Nothing they do could make him hate them. Even if they killed him, he'd die without putting more hate in the world."

She fell silent, and a few minutes later we arrived at her school. I pulled in to the parking lot and parked. "Have a good day." I gave her an especially warm hug, and she returned it with interest. Unlike most teenagers, she had no reluctance to show her parents affection, even where others might see.

"Bye, Momma." She grabbed her backpack and ran for the door just as the five minute warning bell sounded. This being an expensive school, the bell wasn't the loud, jangling variety, but a series of musical chimes, but the message was the same. I watched her until she disappeared inside the building, planning to show this conversation to Edward in my thoughts later that night. As far as ethical issues went, our daughter's emotional development seemed to be progressing very nicely.

When I turned onto the long private drive leading home, on a whim I stopped the car close to the place where Nessie had got out earlier. I caught Mila's scent easily, and walked toward her slowly, at human speed, to avoid making her uneasy. She'd moved to a tall hemlock a little closer to the house. I paused a few feet away and looked up. "Hi there."

After a moment, I heard her answer, "Hello."

"Is there anything I can get you?" I felt a little stupid asking. She was living in a tree. What was I going to bring her, pillow mints?

"No, thank you."

That seemed to be about it. I nodded and prepared to make my farewells, when she leaned over to take a better look at me. Nessie was right: she was very pretty. "You're Bella, aren't you? The girl who was here earlier, she's the...she's your daughter?"

"Um, yes. How did you know?"

"I could hear all of you speaking at the house. I recognized your voice." She had the expected English accent. Not like Carlisle's Restoration era dialect, but something that reminded me of the kids from the Harry Potter movies. "You must think I'm completely mad."

"No," I said, realizing I sounded a little tentative. "Well, honestly, I haven't had the chance to form an opinion so far."

She laughed a little at that. "Fair enough."

Not wanting to be pushy, I started to back away. "Well, I didn't mean to disturb you. You know you're welcome at our house any time you want to join us."

"Would now be all right?"

"Now? Of course. You mean, come back to the house right now?"

"Yes. I think I've been rude long enough. May I walk back with you?"

She dropped lightly from the branch onto the ground below. She was medium-tall with a beautiful figure; her hair was thicker than mine, but wavy and black, hanging loose down her back, a little untidy. Her beauty was of the classical Hellenic type, with large features and strong angles, yet she looked sweet more than imposing. Her skin, apparently dark during her human life, had become pale cream rather than chalky white. She wore jeans and a bulky fleece jacket which was unbuttoned to show a black Pink Floyd tee shirt underneath. All her garments were ragged and - probably due to her recent arboreal activities - stained with pine sap. She carried a small knapsack, and on her feet were what appeared to be workmen's safety boots.

One thing I'd noticed right away. Her eyes were golden. That answered the question no one had wanted to ask William directly.

I suggested we take the car the rest of the way up the drive, since I had to bring it to the garage anyway. Mila got in the passenger seat slowly, looking the car over. "It's been a long time since I've ridden in a car," she said. "It's a lovely car. I like the colour."

"Thank you. It was a present from my husband."

"Oh. That would be Edward, right?" She looked at the house ahead. "He's home right now, your husband?" She amended, "Everybody's home?"

"Yes, everyone except Nessie." I wondered why she looked so worried about Edward being there. I pulled into the expanded garage and parked. I could hear William and Edward finishing a Massenet piece and proceeding into the score from Amelie. "Still playing. They'll probably be at it all morning, if it's up to Edward. He doesn't usually get a chance to play with other musicians."

"No, neither does William," she said, but seemed distracted. She was looking at the front door nervously. "The werewolf's here as well, is he?"

I laughed, and she looked at me. "Sorry, it's just that we don't think of him as 'the werewolf'."

She raised her eyebrows. "What do you think of him as?"

"Jacob."

I opened the door and walked in ahead of her, thinking it might make her less uncomfortable. The family must have heard us coming, but they were not waiting near the doorway to greet her. They were scattered around the room, reading or talking. I assumed it was to avoid putting pressure on their reluctant new guest. The Cullens were considerate hosts.

Edward was at the piano and William standing beside it with his violin. They played the final few notes of their music, then William lowered his violin and looked toward the doorway. "There you are, my lass," he said softly. A smile slowly spread across his face.

Mila smiled in response, almost as if she couldn't help it, and her already lovely face became dazzling. Her eyes met William's and for just a second there was no one else in the room but the two of them. I looked around for no particular reason, just to avoid staring at them. Then William set his instrument down, walked to her and took her hand. "My friends," he said, facing the room, "may I present Timila Sengupta. Mila, the Cullen family."