Part Summary: Bella attempts to get her head around what she's learned even while preparing for her first Christmas alone, grading exams, worrying about finances, writing papers . . . and being visited by the last person she ever expected.
To be honest, Bella is glad when everybody leaves. It has been an exhausting few days -- mentally, emotionally, even physically because she hasn't been able to sleep well. She finds herself radically rethinking her last eight or nine years, wondering what else she's missed, and beginning to ask herself what Edward left out. As he'd been inclined to do that before, why should now be different? Sometimes she wakes suddenly in the night to push herself up in the bed, certain she heard a noise and half expecting to find Edward watching her from a corner. He never is, but at the speed he moves, he could also have left before she knows it.
It creeps her out, and the morning before Alice departs for Helen, she grips her old friend's wrist to demand -- "He's not sneaking in to watch me sleep, is he?" She knows Edward wouldn't be able to fool Alice.
The question appears to surprise Alice (which is a rare thing) -- and that surprise as much as her subsequent words reassures Bella. "No, he's not. He wouldn't do that anymore."
"Are you certain? He's been watching me at a distance for almost a decade."
"'At a distance' is the operative there," Alice says. "He's changed. Just like you have."
"I thought vampires didn't change? You're fixed in your ideas and affections." It's half question, half rebuke.
Brows up, Alice looks ready to laugh. "Edward told you that?" Bella nods and now Alice does laugh. "He has a bad habit of generalizing his tendencies to other people. Edward is stubborn and fixed in his ideas. Of course vampires change, Bella. We don't change as fast as you, and sometimes we can get . . . stuck in a rut, or even caught by time -- caught in time, if you will. The world . . . it moves very fast for us." Alice's gold eyes grow distant. "It becomes easy to . . . slip outside time -- even more for nomads, but for us too. Sometimes I find myself struggling to remember who the president is, or whether this or that event happened last week or ten years ago. It's not that we forget; it's just that there is so much to remember. The world is very different now than what it was when I woke up to being a vampire."
Bella listens with great interest. Vampire time-perception wasn't something she'd given a lot of thought to back then, as a sense of history isn't something most high school students have anyway -- even odd ones like her. The world is an immediate place for teens. Yet she is more aware now of shifts and changes. She has voted twice for a president, seen the fall of regimes, seen the start of wars and their ending -- all in only 10 years. How much more must the Cullens have seen?
Before she can say anything, however, Alice concludes, "But yes, we do change, and Edward has changed a good deal -- much as he might not want to admit it."
After that, Bella stops worrying about waking to find him in her room, and starts to worry about something else Jasper and Alice had said. Edward still loves her. In fact, they'd claimed he loves her more now than he had ten years ago.
The problem is that Bella doesn't still love Edward. Certainly she'd been devastated at first, lost without him and driven to foolish and dangerous acts just to hear his imaginary voice in her head. But time did heal. She met somebody new and now thinks of her first love softly, the old intensity muted by remoteness. Her husband is the man she loved most, and still misses. Sometimes she thinks she can hear Mark's step in the hall, or his voice in a crowd. She remains tuned to his rhythms and looks at the clock when she'd be expecting him home. Except he'll never come home again. She can barely bring herself to cook because he did that, and she washed and gave away all his clothes, then scrubbed her apartment from top to bottom because every time she caught the scent of him, she broke down in hysterical sobbing. She dreams of him, and some mornings wakes to feel his arm braced across her ribcage, his body spooned up against her back. She wonders if she's being haunted -- and doesn't mind.
She isn't ready to let go of him yet, not for anyone, even an old high-school sweetheart she'd once thought a god come to earth. She isn't certain she ever will be ready, although common sense tells her her heart will heal again. Right now, she doesn't want to hear that, or think it. The idea of getting over Mark makes her angry, and she clings to her grief like the lover she's missing.
So she doesn't want to love Edward, and doesn't want him to love her. She wonders if she was wise to suggest he come down from Helen sometimes to visit. It might be cruel. She recalls how Jacob Black had mooned after her until her accident and move to Jacksonville. Yet Jacob had met Irene a few years after that, and is long over her now.
Can Edward move past her the same way? Or is he too stubborn and stuck in a rut, as Alice had suggested vampires could get? She hopes she still likes him enough to put up with him. She was infatuated before and never saw him clearly. Things could get awkward if, after all this time, she discovers he really is a jerk (as some at Forks High once claimed), or they have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. So much of their previous interaction was fueled by hormones and mutual curiosity (in her case, both of him and of vampires). Mark, however, had been her best friend and her equal before they became lovers, then spousal units. She misses their debates and trips of discovery to this or that new place; she even misses their occasional quarrels. She isn't sure Edward ever saw her as his equal, despite his declarations of admiration. He'd treated her like a blown-glass ornament. If he starts doing that again, she isn't sure she'll be able to be polite about it.
In any case, she knows she must stop over-thinking it. The end of the semester is approaching and she has a paper to complete for her final seminar, as well as plans to make for the imminent Christmas break. Thanksgiving had passed with her buried in the library, and immediately after, she'd been preoccupied with the Cullens. But now, she must decide what to do with herself for the holidays -- wishes she could just ignore it all. She's not ready to celebrate without Mark.
At least she knows she can pay the January rent and still eat. After that -- well, she just isn't sure. Technically, her lease runs through May but the landlords -- accustomed to the uncertainties of renting to senior citizens and the disabled -- allow some flexibility. If she can give one month's notice, she can have 75 of her safety deposit back. The problem is that she's not sure she can prepare for her comps and orals and prepare a CV for job hunting -- never mind schedule job interviews. She really needs the cushion of February, and maybe even March after that. If she can count on Renee to help, she hates to ask. Perhaps if it came down to it, she could borrow one month's rent from her mother and one from her father with a promise to pay it all back in installments when she gets a job. And she will pay it back. She prides herself on self-sufficiency -- always did.
(It never crosses her mind to ask Edward or Alice for it.)
A Tuesday afternoon in early December, exactly seven weeks after Mark's death, she is in for her final office hours of the semester. The day has been busy with students, so when her office door is darkened by yet another shadow, she just says, "Come in," and barely glances up.
Then she does a double-take.
Rosalie Hale stands there, dressed to the nines in a dark blue silk suit and matching -- but surprisingly sensible -- pumps. It's probably all Gucci or Chanel or Versace but Bella would hardly know. Instead, she focuses on Rosalie's face. It's serious but not unfriendly. Her gold hair is back in a no-nonsense twist and she wears a minimum of makeup -- she's not playing the model. She looks very . . . professional.
"What are you doing here?" Bella blurts, then realizes how rude that sounds and rubs her eyes. Just what she didn't need right now -- another Cullen, and her least favorite of the bunch. "Sorry, I'm just -- "
"-- surprised?" Rosalie finishes. "No doubt. Are you finished with office hours for the day?" She glances at a pretty gold watch on her wrist. "It's four-thirty."
Bella considers her visitor for three breaths. Rose appears . . . not impatient, but oddly eager. Curious in turn, Bella decides she's quite ready to be done for the day -- and the semester -- and so says, "Yes."
Nodding once, Rose sticks her head back out the door to tell somebody waiting there (and there are still students?), "Office hours are over. You should have planned ahead." She pulls the door shut. If not quite a slam, it's final.
Bella can't help but smirk. "I'm sure somebody's pissed."
Rose shrugs with one shoulder. "I don't have much pity for procrastinators." She takes the empty seat without being invited and crosses her legs, perfectly manicured hands laced atop her knees. But her nails aren't painted.
"I thought you weren't talking to Edward?" Bella begins
Rose's lips curl. "I wasn't. But I am talking to Alice and Jasper. Now that Edward has decided to stop being five kinds of idiot, I can talk to you, too."
"I thought you didn't like me?" Bella blurts it out.
Rosalie's eyebrows lift. "Not like you? Honestly, Bella, don't be silly. I thought you were a threat to the family at first, and later, I thought you foolish for being so ready to throw away your whole life for a boy, but I never disliked you -- not in the way you mean. I wouldn't be here now if I'd disliked you. I'm here because I need your help -- and your expertise."
Bella isn't sure what she feels upon hearing that -- some relief and some resentment. But mostly she feels a jarring shock, a tearing aside of her adolescent constructed realities. Rose had been the perfect, popular beauty queen of high school whom Bella couldn't hope to match. Even after she'd learned Rose was a vampire older than Bella's own mother (and grandmother), her insecurities hadn't changed. Rose had been That Girl, the one all the other girls had loved to hate and who they'd assumed out to get anybody and everybody just because she could.
"My expertise?" Bella stammers now, trying not to sound shocked.
"Yes." Rose pulls a business card out of her purse and leans forward, handing it to Bella, who glances down at it. The central legend grabs her attention beyond addresses and phone numbers:
Rosalie L. Hale, L.L.P.
providing representation in
Family Law and Domestic Violence
Rose was a lawyer? Mouth open, Bella lifts her eyes to stare. "Uh -- how can I help you?" She hopes she doesn't sound as baffled as she feels.
"I want to open a shelter for battered women and victims of spousal rape. I've got more than enough money for the start-up, and I can handle the legal aspects, but I need someone who knows how to run the thing -- establish community contacts, work with the police and social services, find us a secure location . . . all that. I realize it's not exactly your speciality in women's studies, but I figured you'd at least know where I need to start."
"I . . . I . . . " Bella can't speak for a moment, then manages, "But . . . why? I mean, well, you . . . ah . . . "
Rose seems amused by Bella's beached-fished imitation. "Why would I care? You weren't with us long enough to hear my story, were you? Why I was turned?" Bella shakes her head. "I was gang-raped and dying in a Rochester alley when Carlisle found me." This is offered matter-of-factly in a voice devoid of self-pity. "It's taken me almost eighty years to figure out it's time to stop being angry at the world and blaming fate. My assailants are long dead but there are a million more out there just like them." Her yellow eyes narrow. "I plan to kick the hell back and start taking names. Are you with me?"
Dumbly, Bella nods and Rose holds out a hand. Bella takes it; Rose's grip is cold and firm. "This isn't precisely how it's done," Rose says. "I should draw up a contract with a job description, salary, and duties first, but -- you're hired."
A/N: Once again, thanks to everybody who's taken a minute to review. I love hearing from you. Let me know what you think of this little twist! Rose is back and she's mad as hell. LOL! (And maybe she's not quite who Bella remembers or first thought.) Don't fear for Edward and his feelings, however of course Bella would still be grieving for Mark. It hasn't been two months yet.