Yesterday, September 16th, was IGA's first birthday. I offer it this chapter, in birthday good cheer.

"Bella."

It was barely a whisper. Alice swayed where she stood, one hand gripping the newel post, the other pressed over her lips, as though she could stem the tide of gasping breaths that threatened to burst out of her. The very same ones that Bella could feel wrenching out of her own chest.

Alice. Oh Alice.

And she was running. Up the stairs, two at a time. Catching Alice as she wavered, their bodies falling with a soft thump on the landing, arms and legs and hands tangled together, their heaving sobs a symphony of loneliness and regret, offered up to a silent heaven.

Alice was holding her tight – too tight. But the screaming protest of Bella's ribs was lost to her as the grief and desolation of the last five years burned through her, hot as venom, and she held onto Alice as hard as she could as she wept and wept and wept.

"I never got to say goodbye. I never got to say goodbye." Alice's voice was thick and strange in Bella's ears, full of plaintive longing as they rocked together on the floor.

"I didn't want you to go," Bella whispered fiercely between her sobbing breaths. The words scorched in her throat, litany and incantation both, and Bella repeated them over and over, as if she could somehow press the gulf of time between them together, to heal the wound before it was begun. "I didn't want you to go."

There were no more words for them then, for sisters in grief they understood; and the wave of sorrow rose in an inexorable swell, covering them both.

X X X X X

Emmett skidded to a halt on the smooth floor just outside of the entryway. A moment earlier it seemed, he and Jasper were high up on the mountainside, intent on their game, when Jasper suddenly stiffened, his eyes focused on some distant mark, before he whipped around and belted downhill, leaving a stunned Emmett in his wake.

And then he heard what Jasper had – a low rumbling sound that just tickled the edge of his hearing. The sound of American iron.

"Jesus shit."

Bella.

They hadn't known she was coming. All contact with Edward had ceased that afternoon in Montana when Bella had taken him away. Even Alice had been unable to see where he had gone. And now she was home, alone with Rose, waiting for Carlisle and Esme to return from Vancouver. Emmett cursed again, knowing full well what the loss of Bella had cost her – Alice would need them all.

He had run then, faster than he ever thought possible, Jasper's tall frame a whisper of thought ahead of him, pushing himself until he was certain his legs would split from his body, pelting on madly down the mountain, leaving the brains of the matter behind.

Emmett had hoped for Bella's return, but dreaded all the same.

"Come home for you, Bella," Emmett had said the day she had come to collect Edward's things at their hotel. "Because you want to. Not because you think you should."

"I will come back," Bella had replied. "Or not at all."

He had felt a little in awe of her, so different she had become. No longer bumbling and awkward, but terse and proud, a living monument to her secret pain. Watching her press her lips together in a thin line as she swept Edward's bag onto her shoulder, Emmett felt an odd pang of fear for his wayward brother.

Bella was the keystone for Edward, whether he willed it or no – the one thing that could bring him absolution, or utter destruction; and though the rest of the Cullens felt themselves bound together in familial affection, without Edward, the ultimate sham of their existence had glared at them, a dark stain on the bright walls and clear floors of the home they inhabited.

It frightened him – how much they needed her.

The damp forestland passed in a blur, blue and green and black in the coming dawn; and then he was bursting out of the woods, past the sentinel firs around the back of their latest home, up the porch, only to be brought short by the scene unfolding before him.

Alice and Bella knelt together on the upstairs landing in a crumpled heap, their arms wrapped so tightly around each other Emmett could barely see where one woman stopped and the other began. Only by the stark contrast of their skin, rose and gold against indigo and ivory, could he tell them apart. They could have been statues they were so still. The still air of the house was punctuated with their soft, gasping breaths.

Rosalie stood by the front door, a stricken look on her face. Edward was just behind her, as if he were using her body as a shield, his shoulders hunched miserably, looking very much as if he would like to vomit. But neither of them had eyes for Alice and Bella.

Instead their gaze was focused on Jasper, as he pressed up against the banister, gripping it as though it were a lifeline thrown to him in a building sea, his expression a mix of pure longing and abject terror.

Bella had come back to them.

To damn them or save them, Bella had come back.

Emmett went to his wife, placing a tentative hand on her shoulder. He felt her shudder, letting out a great sigh as she reached up and clasped his fingers with her own.

Man up, he thought to Edward, not entirely unkindly. Edward was an idiot to be sure – of that Emmett was certain – but he was not altogether bad. The smothering guilt that had overwhelmed any sense of his self worth was not ill intended, though Emmett did not doubt that Edward used his ability to peer into the minds of others and twist their thoughts in a way that justified his own skewed perceptions of himself. Used it until Emmett thought that maybe Edward could not see the difference between what was right, and what was the product of his own elegant fabrication.

Bella had changed all that. Her immunity to his gift had finally driven him out of everyone else's heads and back into his own. They had been so hopeful for him then. He had finally seemed like a boy – able to become the young man he had been denied in the odd journey of his life – to be the Edward he had always meant to be.

Emmett wondered if he would finally get the chance to try.

Edward let out a rough sob as Bella whispered something to Alice on the stairs. Their own sobs had quieted, and now the two young women knelt facing each other, their foreheads pressed together, hands on each other's shoulders.

"You wanted this," Emmett whispered to Edward as they lingered there at the foot of the stairs. "We all wanted this."

Without a word, Rosalie turned to Edward, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, drawing him with Emmett out of the room; while behind them, Jasper set a tentative foot on the stairs, gently, as though he were a knight gallant, ready to awaken a fair maiden from her enchanted slumber. Only now he found that she had been awake the whole time, watching him – that he had been the dreamer all along.

X X X X X

Jasper stood at the bottom step, one shaking hand on the rail.

Bella felt suddenly beyond awkward.

How did one comfort the man – vampire – who had once tried to eat her? There was no lingering fantasy – that she would hold out a forgiving hand in benediction and he would kiss it like she were royalty, nor any ridiculous platitudes, no "I'm sorry I made you want to make me dinner" – only the pain etched on his face, and Alice's thin frame pressed against hers, quaking with uneven breaths.

Scrubbing the tears off her face with the heel of her hand, Bella rose to her feet unsteadily, drawing Alice up with her. Their fingers knotted painfully together as Jasper made his way cautiously up the stairs. He stopped, just below the landing, his eyes level with hers.

There was no calm aura about him now, no reserve, and Bella could feel the swirling tendrils of his heartbreak as they mingled with her own.

They stared at each other a long minute, a thousand words and none at all shared between them.

Achingly slow, Jasper reached out an unsteady hand, his index finger just barely tracing Alice and Bella's shared grasp.

"Thank you," said Jasper softly. And then it was all simple, as Bella put a hand on his shoulder, leaning her forehead against his temple, and Alice wrapped her arms around them both.

X X X X X

Emmett and Rosalie sat with Edward at the kitchen island, watching him as he hunched over the countertop, head in his hands. They had wanted to give Jasper at least the semblance of privacy, though Rosalie was clearly curious about everything Bella – especially wanting to become more acquainted with the monster currently parked out in front of the garage – whispered as much to Emmett as they guided Edward out of the entryway.

Emmett was quiet. Edward seemed off, for lack of a better word. Almost two weeks alone with Bella, the scent of her so strong on his skin that Emmett wondered if Edward hadn't just thrown her down and rolled on her, yet he still appeared to be living under the shadow of an axe.

Edward nodded, his hands fisting in his hair. Everything about him seemed to droop, his hair, his clothes, even the laces on his boots hung limp and ashamed. When he raised his eyes they were dim and bleak.

"She came back," Edward said in a dull voice. "I just don't know for whom."

"Has she –"

"No."

Rosalie frowned slightly, shaking her head disapprovingly, and Edward glared at her.

"Yes, that would have been very helpful, Rose," he snapped without elaborating. "All she would say to me is that she had to make this right." He put his head back down on the table. "She didn't say anything about me."

And Rosalie shocked Emmett then, pulling Edward into an awkward hug as he crouched on the barstool, ruffling the unhappy mop of his hair.

"I'm sorry," he choked into her shoulder. "I'm so sorry. I've done horrible things – "

Emmett shared a bland look with Rosalie.

"You're done human things, Edward," he said at last. "It's not normal to be as perfect as you were trying to be. Sometimes people get hurt." Emmett scratched his smooth chin thoughtfully. "It's just that most folks don't have the luxury of an eternity to make it up to their family when they've done them over."

But you're on your own with Bella. Whatever she wants . . . we owe it to her to honor that.

Edward shivered in Rosalie's embrace. Somewhere in the rumpled mess of arms, ruddy copper and despondency came a small, sad voice.

"Where's Carlisle?"

"Oh, honey," said Rose sadly. "I don't think Carlisle can fix this."

X X X X X

There was a small library in the Cullen's house, lined with tall mahogany bookshelves, with a small river rock fireplace nestled against the center wall. A small fire was lit, crackling merrily, filling the unlit room with a soft ruddy glow. Its light jumped and flickered over the silent spines of the shelves occupants lingering briefly on their hushed conversations, the whispered words pressed between sighing pages. On the plush loveseat before the fire two figures sat, knees drawn beneath them, shoulders together, the combined halos of firelight blurred as their heads touched.

Alice absently toyed with a lock of Bella's hair as it spilled over her own shoulder.

"It's gotten so long," she mused, wrapping a length of it around her fingers, watching the strands glint like old brass against her pale skin.

Bella sighed, thinking of all the times Alice had played with her hair, envious that she could never put hers in a braid, nor feel its weight upon her narrow shoulders. They had laughed then, when Bella had let Alice "borrow" it, hiding behind her and flipping the long brown tresses over Alice's head in front of a mirror, giggling as the smaller girl preened her newfound hair.

It was much longer now. The brown locks that had once just kissed her shoulder blades now tumbled in an umber cascade down to her hips. Hidden in the thick waves was that lone silver streak, the secret map of her lonely history.

"How come you never –"

Bella stilled Alice's question, grasping the small hand still tangled in the dark strands.

"Because it remembered you," she said simply.

A burl of pitch popped and hissed in the fire, but the room was silent, as the shadows housing the ghosts of the past kept a quiet vigil.

X X X X X

The day's sullen rain had finally given over in the late afternoon to heavy, sodden flakes that fell with quiet insistence, covering the ground in a rough layer of over-sugared icing. Purple bruised clouds hung over the dark silhouette of the house, dour and ominous as the Cullens slipped one by one into the small library.

Bella felt rather than heard their entrance, as they sidled into the darkened corners of the room, sensing their wary eyes upon her. She could see Edward out of the corner of her eye, rigid against the wall, the elegant lines of his body tense and uncomfortable. His eyes were hidden in the shadows, black and unreadable. Rosalie stood next to him, proud and aloof. Only the iron grip in which she held Edward's elbow belied her façade of perfect calm.

Emmett was next, coming to stand on the other side of Edward, his usually open face inscrutable. Of all of them, Jasper looked most at ease, already sitting on the floor at Alice's feet as she sat next to Bella on the couch. His head was thrown back on the cushions against Alice's knees and his long legs stretched out towards the fire. Jasper's eyes were closed, but in his gift he could not escape, and when Carlisle and Esme at last entered the room, the way for him was shut.

"Bella." Carlisle's voice was soft, but heavy, falling into the hidden cracks as he stood behind her– the emptiness that was not Edward. Bella shivered.

"Carlisle." She did not turn around. Instead her eyes were focused on the fire, searching in its depths as if she could find in it the burning thing that had filled her chest as the Cullens crept into the room – as if she could pluck it out with the wrought iron tongs and throw it out into the falling night.

Would it hiss, she wondered, when it hit the ground?

His name was thick in her mouth, the consonant C so different, and yet so achingly similar to that of the man with whom she shared her paternal DNA. Yet neither of them would let her call them the name she had needed most: Father.

For a brief moment Dr. Reyerson's weathered features swam before her in the fire, dry and sardonic as always, his sharp gray eyes commanding, steeling her spine even as her vision blurred with tears.

Courage, Swan, she knew he would say.

Courage. Courage to strip herself bare; to uncover all the secret agonies she had buried; to shatter her broken heart once again; to give them back from whence they came.

Oh, Doc, this is going to hurt.

"I missed you. All of you. Every single day." Bella's voice was a rasp, sharp in her breast, scraping along the soft pine walls, dry in her own ears. The salt tears scalded her swollen eyelids. "I thought – I thought you –" A bubble of grief rose up in her throat and she could not finish. I thought you wanted me?

Not enough, apparently. They ringed the room – silent, pale totems of her past, symbols of the long years she had spent without them, whispering her sorrows to the trees of another forest.

Angrily she dashed the tears from her cheeks.

"Edward told me what he said," she began again. "What he told you about me."

Behind her she heard a heavy sigh, and Carlisle at last came round the couch to face her, dropping on his knees to look up into her face. His eyes caught the light of the embers as he turned, and they glowed strangely for a moment, orange and alien as Bella looked over the once familiar lines of his features.

Carlisle looked ashamed. It made him look very young.

But Carlisle's shame was her desolation, and she had borne the burden of Edward's prejudice for far too long in the span of her short life. She would bear its brand no longer.

"How?" It burned in her throat. "How could you believe him?" She did not dare look at the "him" in question. "How could you think so little of me?"

Her eyes rested on the soft waves of Carlisle's hair as he looked down at his hands. His voice was rough when at last he spoke, "Believe me when I say this, Bella, we never meant to hurt you.

"But you must understand, it is a lonely life being as we are, even as a family. There are not many of us who . . . live . . . as we do. It is a difficult thing, to try and retain our humanity – to live in such close proximity to that which we most desire – to be rejected despite of all our best efforts."

Carlisle's words fanned the burning ache in Bella's breast, until it flared, scouring in her veins, scorching down into her fingertips.

"I never did! I never would have done that," she hissed, before turning to the rest of the family, eyes wide and streaming. "I loved you! I loved all of you!" I still do.

Even Rosalie; whose sour reticence she was finally beginning to understand.

"But you left me." Her voice sounded pitiful, even in her own ears.

"We did." Carlisle agreed. He rubbed an anxious hand through his hair, before gazing at her bleakly. The gesture sparked an odd bloom of recognition.

Edward, Bella thought dispassionately. He looks like Edward.

Unaware of her strange revelation, Carlisle continued, "For centuries I walked this earth alone, trying to redeem what I had become, helping where I could, healing where I could. But always, I was alone. Even with Edward . . ." Carlisle cast an apologetic glance at his first son. "We crave companionship just as you do. But humans shun us naturally, and rightly so. In this world of so many . . . we are so alone. Until there was you."

He looked at Bella sorrowfully. "You don't know how precious you were to us, Bella."

The sincerity of his tone stung. Always she had doubted. Always she had been unsure. Whether or not she was wanted, whether or not she was important. And now she had heard those words come awfully too late. A sharp sob welled up in her throat, ripping its way out unbidden.

"You came to us – you trusted us – for all that you knew we were." Carlisle's gaze lingered on the silver strands in her hair, knowing full well what had caused them. "You gave us hope in the face of so much evil.

"That night after your birthday when Edward came home without you, I – we were devastated. For him, because he loved you and for the rest of my family because they had tried so hard and failed."

Poor Jasper.

"We never questioned his explanation," Carlisle continued. "It made sense that you would finally be afraid – that you realized one of us might harm you."

Beside her, Alice shuddered. "It was easy to believe Edward, Bella," she said in a low voice as Jasper reached up to grasp her hand. "Logical even. We brought you so much danger."

Memories of Alice wrestling Bella into her prom dress and prodding her with a curling iron while she shrieked and laughed surfaced briefly, and Bella sniffled wetly.

"I liked your danger," she said, grasping Alice and Jasper's joined hands. Alice gave her a watery smile, no doubt remembering the same thing.

"I'm so sorry I didn't see it, Bella. I was with Jasper – and then Edward called and I couldn't – " Alice choked, covering her mouth with her fist. Esme stepped behind her, running a soothing hand through her smallest daughter's hair.

"We left for Edward," said Esme. "To see him finally find love and to lose it so awfully . . . we could not bear to see him in so much pain."

"I only wanted to protect my son," Carlisle peered up at Bella imploringly. "It broke my heart, to see him so."

Bella looked over at Edward then, still pressed against the wall, his breathing matching hers, shallow and unsteady. His eyes were closed, but even so, she could see that he too was burning.

"Pain," Bella murmured dreamily. "I know pain. I know what it is to be frozen. To be forgotten. I know that pain." She looked down at Carlisle, still kneeling like a supplicant before her. "But I never knew the pain of being false until I met all of you."

Rising slowly to her feet, Bella turned, looking at each member of the family in turn.

"For the last five years I lived knowing that I loved you, and it wasn't enough. You were the only real family I had and I wasn't enough for you. And now . . . to know that you all thought that it was me who didn't want you?" Her voice was high, tinged with hysteria.

Bullshit, she wanted to scream. This is bullshit.

But she did not, for Edward's eyes suddenly snapped open, filled with naked dread, as Rosalie stepped forward into the firelight.

"How could we know what you felt, Bella?" Rosalie's expression was earnest, and not unkind. "How could you expect us to trust you? How could you know then, what you really wanted? You were just a little girl who was blinded by our glamour."

The truth of Rosalie's words crackled through the air, potent as a slap.

"I don't say this because I don't like you, Bella. I say it because it's something you have always had over us: a choice. None of us chose this life. But you can, or not. And it's not something you can take back. What if Edward Changed you? What would happen then, Bella? What would happen in ten or fifteen or twenty years when you suddenly realized you wanted to have a child? And you couldn't. Did you ever think about that?"

Bella was silent, the throbbing click of her heart as it hammered in her ears the only sound in the room. She had been so certain . . . then. Rosalie was right to question her, to remind her of all that she would sacrifice. None of which she had thought of as young girl. None of which she had thought of as she had rebuilt herself in Edward's absence as the long lonely years of her life stretched out before her. But now . . . nothing was certain anymore.

"What would you do then?" Rosalie pressed. "When there is no more glamour to the lust and the killing? When you realize you don't want this life anymore? What would you do when your regret made you start to hate him?"

"I don't know." The admission fell with a leaden thump in the quiet room, just as Edward's head knocked back against the wall.

"I don't know," Bella said again, as she looked at the faces of the ones she had longed for so dearly.

"Could you blame us, then," Rosalie whispered, "if we wanted to spare Edward that fate?"

"No. I couldn't." She looked directly into Rosalie's eyes the. "Could you blame me? For knowing that for all I missed you . . . that I loved you . . . for feeling that it was never enough?" And with that, Bella burst into tears. Great childlike tears as she wept for the family that had left her, the parents she had never had. For her lost brothers and sisters. For herself, and all her imperfections. For Edward, her lover that had never been true.

"Oh, my girl," Esme whispered, stepping quickly around the loveseat and taking Bella into her arms. "My beautiful girl."

Esme was soft and warm and comfort and home, and all that Bella had never had.

Mother.

"I always wanted you," Bella wept brokenly into Esme's shoulder, as the older woman rocked her gently. "Always."

They gathered around her then, a family once again, the collective bulk of their bodies blocking the firelight, cloaking them in shadow.

None of them noticed that Edward was no longer in the room.

And now we are home. I must say, it's been a very long time coming.

I dearly want to thank everyone for their supporting me while writing this - especially those of you who have been with me since the beginning. One year! Holy cow! It's been quite an adventure for me, and I assure you that I could not have done it without all of you. I'm afraid to name names for fear of leaving somebody out, but please know, that I appreciate each and every one of you who have read, commented, and cheered me on during the (many) times when my wits abandoned me. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Please trust me on this Edward thing. I'd like to think he'd know a shark well enough not to jump over it.

Thoughts? Comments? Here's a birthday hug for all y'all!