V. Repair
In the weeks following the Cullens' return to Forks, Jacob keeps himself busy and distracted working in the garage fixing things. One of his neighbors is paying him a decent amount of cash to do a lot of work on an old convertible. On the afternoon Jacob calls him to tell him he's done, he sounds astonished that it's ready so soon. "In perfect shape," Jacob promises.
"Wow," his neighbor says. "Thanks for being so quick. I ought to give you something extra to make it up to you."
"Don't worry about it."
As soon as Jacob gets off the phone, it rings again. He looks back at it, but he has a feeling who it might be and instead goes to the fridge to get some orange juice, ignoring it. A moment later Billy has picked it up from the other room and calls, "Jake, it's Bella again. Do you want to talk to her?"
Bella. He hasn't seen her or talked to her since her bloodsucker came back. He hears she's fine now. She's happy again. He keeps picturing her the way she was in the past many months, looking so thin and worn-out and with a kind of shallow blankness in her eyes, and then picturing her smiling with a genuinely happy radiance, the way he has hardly ever even seen her himself. It seems harshly unfair.
Does he want to talk to her this time? For once, he considers it fleetingly, imagining a conversation strangely similar to the other one he just had on the phone. "What? What do you want? You came to me broken and I fixed you. You've been returned to your owner in perfect shape. And he can't make it up to me, so what more do you want?"
Instead, he calls back, "No. Tell her I'm out."