Prologue

Growing up Renee had always taught me to not be like her. She wasn't a very smart person, to begin with, and had gotten married to my dad, Charlie, not even a year after dating. Renee ended up pregnant with me not even a year into her marriage too. She divorced Charlie when I was six-months-old, still an infant and left the cold and dreary town of Forks behind. She left behind the man who loved her unconditionally and would have gone through hell and back to make sure she would always have a place to call home and a husband to always love her.

Of course, the one time I ended up going out to hang out with some of my few friends in Phoenix, I ended up pregnant. It was before I was seventeen and the boy happened to be still in high school (thankfully) but I never told anyone who he was.

He was nice, he sent me money throughout my pregnancy and would visit me whenever we'd make sure neither of our family members and friends would follow us. We didn't love each other, but we said we'd make sure to be good parents to our child because the last thing it needed to feel was unwanted. There was also the chance we would put the baby up for adoption when the time came, we weren't throwing that off the table. We just wanted to enjoy my pregnancy before the baby came.

Then on my seventeenth birthday, I woke up to blood coming from between my legs. I screamed, and screamed. Renee came into my bedroom and called for an ambulance. I was far along in my pregnancy, far along enough for me to know I was having a daughter, and far enough that I was showing a good pregnancy bump. I was far enough to feel my baby kicking and far enough that I was actually ready to see my baby in my arms.

I ended up being five months pregnant when I lost Avalyn. I had just celebrated Renee's second wedding a week earlier, and in those photographs there would always be me with my arms wrapped around my belly and a warmth resonating throughout me. Pregnancy suited me, something that neither Renee nor I imagined would happen but it did.

Now, I was standing in the busily populated Phoenix Airport, one of my hands reaching up and wrapping around my silver locket. I sometimes would touch my stomach and remember I would have been about to have my baby this month. I would be near the end of my pregnancy, in the last month. Only my womb was empty, my baby was cremated and her ashes were within my locket with the name: Avalyn: engraved upon it.

"I wish you would stop fiddling with that locket of yours. It probably would have been better if you had buried her," Renee spat quietly, her face flushed red. Both in anger and in embarrassment.

She hated how natural pregnancy came with me, when she had hated her pregnancy of me, and she hated how I had gone ahead and ended up pregnant when she told me not to. She obviously didn't show any disappointment in losing her future granddaughter, it was as though I had been sick for a few months but then one morning I was cured. I wouldn't end up actually becoming a mother, so that meant Renee wasn't a failure of a mother.

A few tears appeared in my tear ducts but I cleared my throat and straightened up. I turned to Renee, and merely dismissed what she had said. "I'll tell Dad you said hi."

It was the only thing I could say, instead of just telling her, "Fuck you!", since I knew the last thing I needed to do was cuss at my own mother in the airport. I knew I was the victim but I wasn't going to have her use my emotional turmoil to make her the victim instead.

"I'd rather you don't. I'm with Phil now, the last thing I need to do is think about your dad," Renee merely remarked, enough for me to tighten my lips together at the mention of Phil Dwyer.

Phil was currently back at the house getting the last of their things together for them to travel cross country for the minor league baseball team he was a part of. He was a great baseball player and he was supportive of me a hundred percent when he learnt I was pregnant, even offering to have him and Renee raise the baby and have Avalyn as my 'sister' until I would be finished with college and I could claim her as my daughter legally again.

Above us my flight number was called, alerting me to get to the terminal so I could board the plane. I didn't hug Renee, partly because of her dismissal and disrespect towards Avalyn, but also because she was already picking up her bag so she could head out of the airport. Maybe if I hadn't gotten pregnant and lost Avalyn then she would have wanted to hug me goodbye and tell me to email her.

Ever since Avalyn and the miscarriage, Renee had shoved me out of her life. Me leaving to be with Charlie was probably the best thing to happen to her. I tried to keep myself from having tears fall down my face as I went towards my terminal, hoping things would be different when I would go and live with Charlie.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I don't know if Marcus and Bella will have a child of their own, with the trauma Bella had with Avalyn. If I do I will have them end up with a boy. let me know what you thought about the prologue.

-Emmy

as always: Twilight doesn't belong to me