AUTHOR'S NOTE: A new chapter. Sorry, I've become a little stalled in writing this. I know I keep mentioning that things will pick up soon, and they will. I just have to figure out the sequence of how I want everything to unfold. Anyway, this chapter probably doesn't contain much, but here it is.

Stephenie Meyer's the genius, I'm just playing in her sandbox.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:

As soon as I saw who had unintentionally intruded on my moment of dispair, my eyes seemed to latch onto the cream carpet beneath her bare feet.

It seemed now was going to be time for me to come clean with Piper. At least a little bit.

I sighed in spite of myself and shrugged as I turned to bodily face her. Even though my eyes were still downcast, I could hear the muted buzz of confusion from her mind. She had no idea what she had been about to walk in on, her only goal before hearing my moaned omission was that she had a question for me from Carlisle. A pocket of my mind tucked that away for later as the main part of my brain focused on trying to answer her question as painlessly as I could. But I just could not do that. There seemed to be something hindering me from telling this mysterious girl who Bella was.

"It's okay if you don't want to tell me." She spoke finally, breaking the fallen silence between us. Her arms were tucked tightly against the front of her faded tee shirt, bottom lip between her teeth with the saddest expression I'd ever seen on her face. "It's probably none of my business anyway."

She was thinking that I didn't want her to know, that she'd crossed some sort of invisible line and slipped into some private space she had no business being in. It was all the furthest thing from the truth.

Suddenly, I wanted this girl to know every single thing about me that she wanted to. I wanted to be able to sit with her and talk of my past, as long as she was a willing participant. Blowing out a breath I hadn't been conscious of holding, I shook my head and quickly rose to my feet when she started for the door. "No, it's not like that." I announced, knowing I would need to start speaking immediately if I wanted to keep her from leaving. "Bella...she's a girl I left behind a few years ago."

"Oh." The quiet surprise in her voice would have amused me in any other normal circumstance. Piper nodded and slowly turned back around to face me. Her hair wasn't styled, laying perfectly straight against the back of her head. There was a boyish quality to her appearance when she wore her hair like this, but I couldn't fully let it register right then. "How long ago did you...leave?"

"Three years." I answered and winced at how quiet my voice had become. My knees buckled under an invisible weight and I found myself sitting with a small blink of my eyes. "Three years ago, I decided that I knew what was best for her and left town. She was human, the age you were before...."

"Before I was changed." She supplied quietly and moved to fold herself on the floor at my feet. Her legs tucked gracefully underneath her body, needing no aid in changing her position. There was a heart-wrenching grace to it all, I noted dimly. "Did you...I mean, was there ever a possibility that you were going to bring her over?"

"For a while." I conceeded with a sharp nod of my head. I'd assumed that it would nearly destroy me to talk to Piper about the girl I kept unknowingly comparing her to. How was it fair for this girl to hear about her competition without the knowledge that she actually had someone she was fighting with? I hadn't even known it until just now. That too was pushed aside as I nearly threw myself into a half-assembled explanation. "She wanted to be...one of us. But I couldn't consent to it. I didn't want that kind of life for her. Not for Bella, who deserved more than I could ever give her. She was accident prone, probably still is." I added with a mirthless laugh and shrug of my shoulders. "But my world kept hurting her. She was the victim of a tracker, which is a vampire that specializes in stalking his or her victims. He nearly killed her when she tried to run. There were other instances where I felt like it was my fault she was being hurt."

"What was the final straw?" If Piper was thinking anything specific about what I was telling her; her thoughts were keeping that under tight lock and key. "You couldn't have reached the decision to leave so quickly. You sound like you really cared about this girl."

"I did." I nodded with another quiet sigh. "She was unlike anything I'd ever known, any other person I'd ever met. Bella Swan very nearly became my undoing. You know how humans' blood have a very specific flavor?" When she nodded, I mimiced the gesture and continued. "Bella had the most intoxicating blood I'd ever smelled, I very nearly drained her the day we met. I was pretending to be a high school junior then, just as I am now and she was my lab partner in Biology." I had to smile right then at the irony of it all. Two vampires talking about the human facade their family had adopted in order to mainstream.

"But you didn't." She guessed slowly, one eyebrow raising as she leaned her arms on her thighs. "You didn't answer my question though. What made you leave her, Edward?"

I frowned and clenched my eyes shut in near exasperation. Leave it to Piper to be so astute that it would irritate me. "Alice threw her a birthday party when she turned eighteen. One papercut, while opening the present I'd given her, resulted in me throwing her across a table with crystal dishes so that Jasper couldn't attack her. His tolerance was still very shaky back then, but since that night he's made a more concerted effort."

"I was wondering about that." She revealed with a small shake of her head. The soft rumble of her statement threw me momentarily. Had Jasper mentioned something to her about my moody demeanor? Did she, deep down inside, have a secret knowledge about why I was always so cautious and distant with her? She shook her head slightly then, as if to unlodge some quiet thought. I watched silently as she bit down on her lower lip yet again then looked back up at me. Her bloody eyes were wide and innocent as she stared up at me. It didn't take a peek into her mind for me to know that she was trying to be as nonjudgemental as she could be with her next string of words. "Jasper mentioned her once, but he never said her name. I asked why he was always so...formal around humans and he told me that he had caused your last relocation."

"Leave it to Jazz to start laying the puzzle pieces." I conceeded with a small, bitter laugh as I laid my arms over my thighs and stared down at the floor between us.

"Can I ask you something?" She asked in her quiet, raspy voice. I looked up and noticed that her eyes were still wide and innocent.

"Go ahead." I inclined my head slightly and waited tensely for whatever she was about to ask of me.

"If you could go back to that night, knowing what you know now; would you go back and make the same decision?"

For once, she was asking a question that brought me up short. It was always the other way around, but only because of the past she still couldn't remember clearly. I knew, from Alice and Rosalie's whispered conversations with Esme and Carlisle, that she had a few memories back. But they were only about people that had held some importance in her human life. They couldn't have been too important though, at least not where she was concerned, since she was still unclaimed. "In a heartbeat." I finally answered, not being able to ignore the sudden weight of pain flaring in my chest.

Only, I couldn't be sure if it was from thinking about going back and staying in Bella's life; or if it was because of the look that ghosted across Piper's face once I'd answered her question. I had just said something that she very obviously didn't want to hear.

After my clipped explanation of Bella Swan's impact on my life, Piper had delved into the search of her own past. I hadn't mentioned any of the pivotal moments that had transpired between us in the past few days, and she didn't seem to want to do the same. Neither one of us even thought about bringing up the moment in the garage, once we'd left the mall. I'd thought about it plenty of times as the days stretched on into the fifth month of her life. I still felt horrible for how I'd reacted that day, that guilt only intensifying when she stopped asking to accompany me into town. She didn't trust herself around humans, that was the lie she was basing her seclusion on. But I knew better. One accidental glimpse into her head had confirmed that when I carried her through the garage, ignoring her requests to let her go, then bodily threw her into the car; I had really shaken her up that day. And now there was the acknowledgement of Bella between us. The barriers were just stacking up between us yet again. There was just no gaining any common ground with this girl.

Everyone was starting to get restless as the weather grew darker and more rainy. Alice kept mentioning the possibility of a large storm that would give us the cover needed for a game of baseball. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one with reservations about that activity. No one had forgotten about the last time we assembled together to partake in America's favorite pasttime. It was that one game that had almost cost Bella her life for the second time.

"Hey." I was pulled unceremoniously out of my thoughts by a new voice. I hadn't even heard anyone approach my shaded area of the backyard. I'd been trying to clear my head so I could think, the tree above my head providing enough coverage so I wouldn't be pelted constantly by falling raindrops.

Alice had trudged through the rain to come talk to me. Of course, an umbrella was open above her perfectly styled hair, leaving her dry and unrumpled. I could count on one hand the number of times I'd seen my tiny sister dishevled and dirty. Alice Cullen prided herself on her appearance being perfect at all times.

"What's up?" I asked suddenly. There was no way my sister would have come out in the downpour if she could help it. There was something on the tiny vampire's mind, but she wasn't letting me in on it mentally. She knew how to deflect me when it really mattered most.

"I just wanted to talk to you about Piper." She murmered, her tiny voice clear as a bell over the chaos of Mother Nature. She turned sveltly and sat down beside me on the blanket I had spread out beneath me. It was only slightly damp and wouldn't damage her clothes beyond repair. Not that any of us would ever have to worry about destroying clothes. Alice prided herself on us never wearing the same thing twice. I was the only one left in our family that still fought her on that philosophy. "She's become obsessed with her past."

"As she should." I mumbled and let my head fall back against the wide trunk of an oak behind me. "It's not right for her to still be in the dark after five months."

I felt the slight change of air around me as my words stired Alice. One glimpse out of the corner of my eye caused me to look away immediately. Her tiny eyes were set in anger, her lips pressed into the thinest of lines. "What changed your mind? You've always been so against her finding out the truth."

I sighed then, frowning even more with the absence of human relief from filling my lungs with rain-scented air. I could smell everything from my place on the ground; the rain as it fell in sheets around us, the grass as the percipitation met it, even the trees as their foliage continued to decay in the cold environment. I looked out around us as my thoughts collected themselves. It had always been so easy to sit and talk with Alice, after all we were kindred spirits in more ways than one. But now there was a hint of strain, I had to think clearly about what I wanted and didn't want to tell her. But it was a useless effort. Alice could foresee my lies coming back to bite me in the ass. So I went with the only thing I could clearly focus on.

"I've learned too much about her for the past to continue to be a mystery to her."