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Epilogue – Home
Where the heart is.
And so it began.
For the next five years Edward and I traveled the globe, thinking only about the success of our book series and the strange sensation of being recognized when we spent a few weeks in the States between our trips doing interviews or other promotional activities. For the most part we just celebrated the fact that we were together and got to spend our days seeing some of the most amazing places the world had on offer.
Watching the sunset behind the Tafelberg or looking at the world from the top of Ayers Rock on a beautiful afternoon, swimming with exotic fishes in the Caribbean or sleeping under the sky in the vast expanse of the Moroccan desert …there were so many experiences I would never forget. And they were all better be because he was by my side.
Edward. My happily ever after.
Getting to know him through and through was the best experience of all and in those first five years, our bond grew and grew until neither of us was really sure where one began and the other ended. He was my everything as well as I was his, and I trusted him completely and blindly as we set out, discovering the world one country at a time.
But even compared to the beauty of Africa or Australia and all the things they had to offer, nothing quite trumped getting married at sundown on a staggeringly beautiful beach in India with no one but the priest and a pair of hastily called in witnesses from the local tourist office. It was perfect even if it took us one hell of a party and a lot of ass kissing for our family to forgive us for our elopements.
It was worth it, though. So worth it.
But after five years our travels came to an abrupt end when I found out I was pregnant. It was unplanned and completely unexpected but nothing could have been greater than our happiness as we discovered the news. Fortunately, Aro kept to his promise of never frustrating our happiness, instead presenting me with the new and even more daunting challenge of writing my own book.
A novel, by Isabella Cullen. Who would have thought? Not me, that was for sure.
Still, with some gentle coaxing from Aro and my editor, I managed to somehow write a book, my amazement at actually being able to come up with an original storyline that 'worked' only eclipsed by the fact that, not only was it legible, it became a huge success. As did my next one.
However, my pride and growing confidence at finally feeling like a success in life meant nothing compared by the all-encompassing love and emotion I felt when, at the brink of dawn on a stormy Monday in November, the doctor placed our little girl into my arms, the look of pure adoration in Edward's eyes, visible only though my tears, reflecting my own.
We named her Sophia, after the mighty mosque in the city she was conceived in and she was the most precious souvenir we could have ever picked up along our travels.
Having Sophia in our lives meant a huge change for us, not because it wasn't just the two of us anymore but also because up until that point, Edward and I had led a very nomadic life together, staying only a few months in the same place before moving on.
I'd always thought that that kind of lifestyle wasn't for me; that I was too bourgeois to ever live a Bohemian lifestyle but in reality, it felt liberating to not have a big, fat anchor rooting you to just one spot. We didn't have a house or a mortgage or even much in the way of furniture we could call our own. We could just up and leave whenever we felt like it, discovering new places and new people and picking up more lessons on life and the world we lived in along the way than any type of formal education could ever have taught us.
Having a kid meant that we had to say goodbye to that lifestyle because Sophia needed stability in her young life to grow and learn and so we settled down in New York again, our friends welcoming us back with open arms. We all stuck to Brooklyn, buying houses as close to each other as we could find them and spending almost every night in the safe haven of our 'clan'; watching it grow as Alice and Jasper welcomed their first child into the world and Emmett and Rose adopted a precious little Chinese girl.
We still traveled a lot, though, which wasn't so surprising considering the distance between us and our families and the fact that Edward, now an established photo-artist, spent a lot of his time documenting both the staggering beauty and terrible ugliness of our world. We were also convinced that our little girl and the little boy that followed a few years after Sophia was born, would benefit from broadening their horizons and learning about the world they'd been born into from experience instead of school books.
So we spent their holidays traveling the globe, revisiting some of the most amazing places we'd come across over the years and seeing them anew through our children's eyes; the new impressions and discoveries we made along the way always providing me with inspiration for my next novel or for whatever I was working on at the time.
No, as much as I loved the little house we'd bought, it didn't matter to me where we lived, as long as they were by my side. Because if there was anything all my travels had taught me over the year it was this: home is where the heart is.
And my heart belonged to them.
The End.
Snif.
As I say goodbye to this story and these characters, I would like to take a minute to thank Jadsmama and The Real Teacher for all of the hard work they've put into this story and you, the amazing people who read it. I lack the words to convey how much your support means to me.
Starting next week, my new story Any Way the Wind Blows will take the place of this one. Until then, I am posting my FGB oneshot in daily chapters. You can find both on my profile.
Thank you.
Miss B.