A/N: Let me know if you have questions. I'd love to know how many are out there reading. xoxo

Chapter 28 - Edward is Real

BPOV - Continued

"What the fuck were you thinking?" Jameson yells in her face.

Jameson knew about her downfall, her emotional state, but he never knew it would go this far. He kept his eyes on her. Drove her to the cabin himself like she asked. She was determined to make it there as soon as they both could. He didn't know why. He guessed it was the last place her mother was alive.

He supported her. Cherished her. Calmed her when she needed it. He couldn't leave her alone in these painful moments.

What he didn't know was her true intention. To find Edward and make him see just how much he changed her.

Then, on the day things got tense at the Swan cabin, he was there to listen to them yell and shout. He came in and dared to stay so daughter and father would find a truce. When it became calm and the time was right, Jameson stepped out to run errands for his mother. Bella rowed out in a canoe once he did. No one in their right mind would go out in the rain in a canoe … would they?

He was a lunatic trying to find her, and when he did, she made the jump.

Bella doesn't answer Jameson's furious question. She breathes in the fullness of air.

Air is good. Remember that, Bella.

She desperately wipes her face of water and sand, then squints. Yes, it is him. All she sees is Edward running away.

She looked for him for days, weeks, and then months. She looked and looked for him every morning until she was tired and forced to walk back to the cabin before Jameson showed up at her door, or Charlie awoke. Sometimes she'd hike from midnight until the break of dawn. Yet, no bend to a turn, or coupling of trees looked familiar. Not one path.

Her heart was torn. She cried. She was going mad.

She barely ate. Barely slept. She kept the pain all to herself. To everyone else, she looked to be mourning Renee. She was. But there was something else to grieve for.

Her secret was just in her head. Maybe none of it happened? Maybe she never met a stranger in the woods two years ago. Maybe she never packed up food in a bag. Never headed out of the cabin very early in the morning, quietly, as to not wake her parents.

Maybe all the memories of fireflies around their hands, a tent, a mushroom, or a hammer melded in bark, were all from a story she read years ago in a book. A book with pages torn at the end, never to find out what happened next.

So, she had hope. All of it. Yet, nothing was turning out the way she wished every night.

Edward was but a figment of her imagination.

Spring passed, then summer. She refused to pack her bags to go back home to the city. Charlie and Jameson worried the day she broke down in fits of sobs saying she'd never leave.

She gave in to despair. It was stupid, but like a death call, it brought him to her. As if life was holding out its breath for this moment.

Jameson picks her up off the sand now, but her eyes are still stuck to that silhouette far away. Her eyes opened, and she definitely thought she was dead a minute ago. She knew she wasn't in some blissful afterlife with him. He was soaking wet above her as his clothes clung to him. He was angry, so angry. Fear in his eyes.

She blinks hers.

Edward is real.

….