-Chapter Thirty-Five-

After the death of Laurent came another library apology from Leah.

"We didn't mean to scare you," she whispered to me.

"I wasn't scared of you." The others, yes, because I had no idea who they were. "Who was the huge black one?"

I didn't want to say wolf, in case we were overheard.

"Sam." Leah punctuated her sentence with an eyeroll. "He's the alpha. We have to do what he says. He was chewing me out for sitting with you instead of helping with that leech."

The Quileute pack, I had learned from this conversation with Leah, had many nicknames for vampires. I guessed that was fair—Rosalie often referred to them as 'oversized rabid dogs' after all.

"When I realized we would be interrupting a wedding, I told Sam it could wait, but he didn't listen. Apparently, nobody else in the pack pays attention to the 'peace' part of the peace treaty. I'm sorry you were there when it happened."

"You had no way of knowing I would be. It's okay." Leah waved my words away with her hands.

"It's not, though. For more reasons that just because you were scared. It added fuel to Jacob's fire, the pack exposing ourselves to you, a human, the way we did."

"Oh," I said, the wheels in my head turning. "I guess that makes sense. I haven't seen Bella and Jacob around the library in weeks. I should have known he had phased. Which one was he?"

"That big chocolate brown one, almost as big as Sam. See, I keep telling him that you didn't count, because you knew before, thanks to your mosquito friends. He wants to tell Bella, and he's using that night as an excuse to try to wear Sam down into allowing it."

I wanted to say, no, he can't, but I knew that would be hypocritical before the words could even leave my lips. Jasper had revealed the existence of werewolves…so, no, in the grand scheme of things, it would not be unfair for Jacob to do the same. Problematic, but Jasper had already done the reverse, so I had no place to argue against it.

"Has she been hounding him?" I asked instead. The annoyance was clear on Leah's face.

"Day and night. Billy unplugged the phone two days ago."

"What the hell…" I muttered to myself, more than Leah.

"Yeah, I know. It's annoying as hell. Here, will you give this to…I don't know her name. I only know Carlisle since he's the leader. The bride, could you give this to her? Somehow I've become the diplomat of this crazy pack."

"Rosalie," I told Leah, accepting the little envelope she held out to me. It must have been an apology note. The front of the envelope was blank. "I'll write her name on the front."

"Thanks. Jake told me to just write Sleepless Beauty, but I didn't think that would help much. I'm trying to keep the peace part alive, even if none of the boys are. Only for your benefit, though, if you hadn't guessed."

"Thanks for that," I told her. "Carlisle and Esme will greatly appreciate it. I know y'all don't think so, but they really are good people."

"Yeah, keep drinking the Kool-Aid. I better go, before I get chewed out again for being late to our pack meeting. Don't make that face, it's just a strategy meeting, talking about how we handled things the other night."

"Oh, well good luck, then."

When I gave the apology note to Rosalie, she nearly ripped it up. Carlisle plucked it from her hand just in time, deftly opening the envelope. I don't know what the note said, but Carlisle nodded to himself as he read the words.

"What a kindness," Edward mocked, appearing at the top of the stairs. His hair was mussed, like he had been laying down. He must have heard the words Leah had written as Carlisle read them. "This pack has manners, at least, unlike previous packs."

"Leah has manners," I corrected him. "But she told me something else, too. Jacob's trying to get permission from Sam to tell Bella the truth."

Edward's groan was reflected in the cold annoyance that settled over Rosalie's face.

"He better not be that stupid," Rosalie snapped. "We're supposed to leave in two weeks."

Emmett and Rosalie were sticking to their plan to go to New York. Summer was ending soon, and the new school year was approaching.

"We won't know until it happens, and there's no way around that," Carlisle reminded us gently. "All we can do is wait. We're lucky to have Maisie and her friendship with Leah Clearwater. Surely, we will know quickly, if it happens."

"The most useful human I know!" Emmett enthused, leaning over the couch to high-five me. I was laying down, intending to finish the last book on my summer reading list, but I reached a hand up for him. Jasper, Alice, and Esme were not home—all of them were hunting.

"You need to be thankful you didn't engage her last year, Edward, because apparently home girl is a stalker. Billy Black unplugged their phone to stop all the calling."

"What do you even do in that situation?" Emmett asked. "Her dad's chief of police. Can you even get a restraining order on her?"

"All I know is Jacob has more patience than I do, because I would have hit her by now."

"Maisie," Carlisle chastised me, much like my own father would have.

"That's mild compared to what I would have done at this point," Rosalie threw in.

Something had shifted in my relationship with Rosalie since the night of the wedding. I didn't really understand it. After their Denali cousins had left, Emmett had joked: "We really need to teach Maise that she can't fight vampires."

But Rosalie had taken up for me when Tanya and the others were there. I wouldn't call us friends, but she didn't roll her eyes at me as often as she usually did. She had even opened the door for me to come in on a few times, which had never happened before.

Jasper had told me to treat Rosalie's acceptance the same way one might treat a wild animal. "Let her come to you. Any sudden movements will only spook her."

I did feel bad about Laurent dying. That was horrible for Irina, of course. Losing Jasper right in front of me would have been traumatizing and world-shattering…I understood Irina's reaction, but that still didn't mean I liked it.

But then, does anybody like getting yelled at and accused of being at fault when they weren't even around?

I still apologized to Carlisle, and repeatedly to Jasper, when we were alone. I felt bad for yelling back at Irina.

"I shouldn't have done that," I told Jasper for the millionth time, two weeks after the fact. I was about to take a nap in Jasper's room, because Ava was being loud at my house. Jasper didn't actually have a bed, because he didn't technically need one, but he did have the nicest futon I had ever seen. Since he didn't sleep, Jasper used this wonderful piece of furniture for lounging and reading.

"She was screaming at you and accusing you of things you had no knowledge about." Jasper had a book in one hand, the other running through my hair. "Didn't you tell me you were going to sleep?"

He was teasing me. I had told him I was going to take a nap an hour ago, and I kept talking to Jasper instead.

"Maybe I want to go to midnight practice exhausted, for an extra challenge." The last softball practice of the summer conditioning was always at midnight. I didn't know the rhyme or reason, but it was tradition.

"Do I need Alice to come tell you all the reasons why that would be a terrible idea?" He leaned over my head, bowing his own to kiss my forehead.

"You're a wonderful distraction," I told him, but I did close my eyes, trying to force myself to go to sleep. Between my efforts, and Jasper running his fingers soothingly through my hair, it must have worked. I woke up a handful of hours later, hearing my phone chime. I thought it was my alarm, but when I sleepily reached my hand down and grabbed my phone from the floor, I realized it was a text from Leah.

Bella bomb.

That's all the text said.

"What the hell?" I muttered to myself, because sometime while I slept, Jasper had left his bedroom. I was still staring at Leah's text when my alarm did go off, making me jump in surprise.

I pushed myself up just as Alice appeared right beside me. She reached out and grabbed my hand.

"Come downstairs with me." Still not entirely awake, I let Alice pull me to my feet and lead me down the staircase. My phone started ringing halfway down.

"Don't answer until we get to the living room."

When we got there, everyone was there. Carlisle, Esme, Edward, Jasper, Rosalie, Emmett…the whole family. Later, I would be thankful that the whole event happened the day before Rosalie and Emmett had left for New York.

"Hello?" I asked when I answered, but I had woken up enough for my foggy mind to connect Leah's text with the call from this unknown number. Unbeknownst to Bella, I had her on speaker phone. A courtesy thing, even though I knew everyone would have been able to hear the conversation even without it.

There was a long pause, some incoherent rustling sound, and then Bella's voice came from the other side of the connection. "Is this Maisie?"

"Yeah. How much did you have to flirt with Mike before he gave you my number?" Another pause, in which Bella stuttered and a glare from Edward was not enough to keep Emmett from shaking with held back laughter.

"I didn't get it from Mike," Bella finally choked out.

"Don't lie, I know my friends better than you do. Why are you calling me?"

"You lied to me first. About the Cullens."

I rubbed at my eyes, trying to force myself all the way awake. How long had Jasper let me sleep? The sun had already slipped below the horizon, as evidenced from the huge floor to ceiling windows in the living room of the Cullen house.

"Did I, though?" I countered. To my memory, I hadn't told Bella any lies.

"You said they weren't dangerous!"

Bella was lucky she wasn't in the room I was currently in. I thought Rosalie's glare might make my phone catch fire.

"Yeah, they aren't, so that's not a lie."

"They aren't human, Maisie."

I rolled my eyes upward, taking a good look at her ceiling. I'm not awake enough for this bullshit, I thought. Edward must have agreed; suddenly he was before me, offering me a granola bar.

"Hey, how's Jacob?" I asked, unwrapping my granola bar and taking a bite of it. The crinkle of the wrapper caught her attention, giving Bella a reason to deflect the question.

"Are you eating right now?"

"Yes?"

There was such a long silence from Bella that I almost thought that she had hung up. I was reaching for my phone, to end the call, but a shake from Jasper's head stilled me. He was watching my phone the same way he had watched the werewolves flood his backyard: calculating, intense.

"Jake's fine," Bella eventually said.

"Good." This is where I took a gamble. I didn't know for sure that Bella knew Jacob was a werewolf, but I could put pieces together. Leah's comment about Jacob seeking permission, her cryptic text. It was easy enough to connect the dots. "I wondered how his phasing was going, with his being a werewolf and all."

Bella's sharp intake of breath was more satisfying than it probably should have been. The shift in my mood was enough to crack Jasper's hard expression, breaking his lips into a smirk.

"You know about that?" She asked, her voice small.

"Yeah, I know a lot of things, Bella, even if I didn't go to an advanced school in Arizona. I know a lot of things," I told her again. "Like how you shouldn't speak about subjects you're ignorant on. So, think about that before you call me hundreds of times."

Edward robbed me of the joy of hanging up on Bella when he leaned over the coffee table and did it himself.

"Aw, you made her cry," Alice murmured, her eyes coming back from the haze of the future. Bella must not have been with Jacob, if Alice was able to see any of her future.

"And?" Rosalie asked. "She should cry. If she's stupid enough to call Maisie to ask questions, then she's likely stupid enough to have loose lips. I have no problem flying right back from New York to handle it."

"It won't come to that," Carlisle decided. "We won't allow it. No instigating confrontations." That last part was directed at me, with a pointed look.

I held my hands up in innocence. "She called me."

I was curious how Jacob had worked around Sam's refusal to allow him to reveal the secret to Bella. Jasper had used the fact that I had prior experience, with Maria and James, to justify telling me. As far as I knew, though, the Quileute werewolves didn't have another faction within their realm that made meals of humans.

"No encouraging confrontations, then," Carlisle conceded. I saved Bella's number to my phone, though, just in case. It wasn't my fault that she didn't bother to call with her number hidden.

I didn't want Bella to die. That would have been terrible, and annoying as I found her, I knew she didn't deserve that. But her persistence in inserting herself into a world she wasn't willing to understand was entertaining for me, so I wasn't complaining.

Jasper dropped me off, driving my car back to my house for me because I was still kind of sleepy. He really did let me sleep longer than I intended, but at least I wouldn't get worn out too much from the midnight practice.

I sat with him in the dark of my car.

"I take it back," he told me, holding my jaw in one hand and tipping my head gently back to kiss me. "Perhaps you are too combative for your own good. No wonder you bonded so well with Kate."

"I shot a vampire months ago, before I even knew that's what he was, and you're just now deciding that?"

"Allow me to reword my statement, then." I could see the glint of his smile in the pale moonlight. "I've always known you're too combative and impulsive for your own good…but—this could be my own bias—you make it into an endearing quality."

"Huh, you know, I do like that wording better."

He kissed me again in the dark haven of my car. Though Jasper was hesitant to ever alter my own emotions, he did have a habit I loved: diffusing me with his own. His deepest and truest affection came not in physical touch or words, but in a spreading warmth that started in my chest, just over my heart, and filled my whole body like sunshine.

A/N: Thank you for all of the lovely reviews on the last chapter! It warms my heart to know you guys haven't given up on me and this story, even if I am terrible at adhering to any kind of update schedule.

So. The action will be picking up soon, from here on out. If you remember in the prologue, Maisie states that she sees Maria for the first time when she is 10, and again when she is older. This isn't a spoiler since I already stated it, but I want y'all to be ready. Maisie herself is such a lighthearted character. It's the reason, I think, that it was so easy to write her as fast friends with Emmett and Alice. Her ability to turn serious moments flippant while still getting things done is a fun trait to write about.

I'm excited to explore all the implications I have set up. Between Maisie's friendship with Leah, the Cullen coven being partially divided with Emmett and Rosalie relocating to New York, and Bella and her tendency to make situations worse than they originally are...I think a lot of fun chapters to write are coming up!