The rain started when Edward and Bella were halfway across the parking lot instantly soaking them to the bone. Bella didn't even blink when they found a dry Midnight curled up in the driver's seat of her truck. The mystery of how a cat broke into a locked vehicle could wait for another day. There were far bigger problems to address such as how Edward wound up in a coffin and why her heart sped up when his hand brushed against hers.
Bella handed Edward a towel. It was hot pink and still a little sandy from the beach but at least it was dry. Bella wished she could say the same about Edward's mud-soaked bandages. She hoped Carlisle would be back from the hospital by the time they got home. Edward would need his wounds cleared and redressed if he didn't want to end up with a nasty infection.
Edward shivered and wrapped the towel around his shoulders.
"I'm sorry," Bella said. "I shouldn't have taken you out in the rain."
"You're not a wizard," Edward replied. You can't control the weather."
Edward reached over and squeezed Bella's hand. In spite of the truck's faulty heater, Bella felt like she was wrapped in a warm blanket. Another mystery to add to the list.
. "I should never have taken you here," Bella said, choosing to ignore the wizard comment. "You shouldn't have had to find out about Esme that way."
"You couldn't have known," Edward said, leaning against the window.
Bella didn't reply. She'd known about Queen Esme's death since she was a kid. Since before she knew there was pain greater than a scraped knee.
"You couldn't have known, right?" Edward repeated.
Bella climbed into the back seat of the police cruiser clutching a garment bag. She didn't greet her father with stories of playing dress-up with Alice or video games with Emmett like she usually would after a visit to the Cullen house. She was still mad at him and would probably stay that way for a long time.
"What's that?" Charlie asked as Bella laid the dress across the seat next to her.
"A dress."
While Dr. Cullen didn't have the answers Bella was looking for, the visit hadn't been a total waste. Alice kindly loaned her a black dress and matching shoes. Had it not been for such a solemn occasion, Bella would have been delighted by the way the dress's butter-soft fabric felt on her skin.
"When is the funeral?" Bella asked.
Alice swore she had the perfect necklace to complete Bella's outfit but she's lost it in the disaster zone that was her bedroom. She promised to find it before Bella left for Arizona.
Charlie ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "The funeral is today at six."
"What?" Bella froze with her seatbelt half-bucked. "How could that be? Mom just died."
Bella remembered when her Grandma Swan died. They had almost a week to gather pictures and try on itchy dress clothes before the funeral happened. How could her mom have gone from alive to dead and buried in less than a day?
"Your mom died on Thursday," Charlie said as he back out of the Cullen's driveway.
It was Tuesday. How could her mom have been dead for five days without her knowing?"
"Why didn't anyone tell us?" Bella asked.
Her father didn't answer.
Bella thought back to Thursday night. She'd been upstairs doing homework when the phone rang. A few minutes later, her father came upstairs and said they'd be going on a camping trip with the Blacks. At the time, Bella thought nothing of it. She just assumed her father wanted to squeeze in one more long weekend of hiking and swimming before it was too cold. What if it wasn't Mr. Black who'd called?
"Did you know?" Bella asked.
She took her father's silence as an answer.
"Why didn't you tell me," Bella snapped, unwilling to look at him.
How could her father have done something like that? How could he have allowed her to have the time of her life running around in the woods with Jake while her mom laid dead?
Charlie turned left at the end of the Cullen's long driveway.
"What are you doing?" Bella asked. "The airport is the other way!"
It was a bit last minute, but they could still make it to Arizona if they hurried.
"We're not going to the funeral," Charlie said.
It was her mother's funeral, not a birthday party. They had to go.
"Why not?" Bella asked.
"Because you're too young for this kind of stuff," Charlie said, gripping the steering wheel tightly.
"I'm not a baby!" Bella cried. "I went to grandma's funeral!"
"Your mother's will be different."
"Different how?"
Charlie sighed. "I'll tell you when you're older."
Bella was sick and tired of being told she was too young. A crazy thought crossed her mind. Dr. Cullen had a private plane. Maybe he'd take her to the funeral. Even though the car was moving, Bella opened the door and jumped out.
Bella didn't make it to the funeral. Instead, she spent the night in the hospital with a broken arm and a nasty case of road rash.
Now that Bella was older, she understood why her father didn't let her attend the funeral. He was trying to protect her from the police investigation and media circus. She would have done the same in his shoes.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Edward asked.
Bella didn't have an answer for him. While misguided, her father's motivation for hiding her mother's death had been to protect her. What was her motivation for not coming clean about Queen Esme? To punish Edward for disrupting her life? To prove him wrong in the cruelest possible way?
"I'm sorry," Bella said. "I should have told you earlier."
"Do you have any idea how worried I've been? Edward asked. "I thought my mom was missing!"
Ashamed of her actions, Bella sank down in her seat. She'd experienced the pain of a missing parent. She remembered lying awake all night wondering if her father was somewhere in the woods dying of hypothermia.
The tears Edward had been holding back were flowing freely. "I thought there was still time to save them!"
Bella remembered asking the police to let her help them search for her father. She didn't stop begging until Carlisle pointed out how difficult it would be to hike with crutches. Her father wouldn't want her getting hurt. Bella didn't find out until much later that the police were looking for a dead body, not a living man.
"Edward," Bella started. "I'm s-"
"Enough," Edward said, cutting her off before she could start on another pointless apology."Just take me home." Edward straightened up in his seat. "Home. That's it! You can take me home!"
"What do you mean?" Bella asked,
The way Edward went from heartbroken to bouncing with excitement was a tad unnerving. Bella hoped he didn't plan on going inside the castle. Whatever he was looking for wouldn't be there.
"You can take me back in time," Edward exclaimed. "I'll stop my mom from jumping!"
Bella was great at cooking and could write at a college level, but time travel wasn't one of her talents. If it was, she would have told her dad to stay out of the woods and warned her mom not to marry Phil.
"I can't take you back in time," Bella said.
"You don't have to stay," Edward said. "Just drop me off and go back to your own time. It will be like you never met me."
Bella doubted that. Meeting a strikingly handsome guy claiming to be a prince wasn't exactly an everyday occurrence. Like it or not, Edward had forever changed her life.
"Time travel isn't possible," Bella said. "There's nothing you can do to change the past. All you can do is learn from your mistakes and hope for a better future."
"But..but..but." Edward stammered. "There's a portal to other worlds in your living room! We traveled halfway across the kingdom without any horses! There has to be a way!"
Bella shook her head.
"So you're saying I can never go home?"
Unable to speak, Bella nodded.
While Bella couldn't live there until she turned 18, Charlie's house was still in her name. She could go there whenever she wanted. In sharp contrast, the place Edward thought of as home was now a museum. He'd likely never be able to set foot there again without paying for a ticket.
Edward's shoulders slumped. "Can we go back to your house? I think I need to lay down for a while."
Knowing there was nothing she could say or do to comfort him, Bella nodded and started the truck.
