A/N: I hate to devote these little notes to apologies, but I feel I owe you one. Sorry I'm horrendously late. Still, I'm posting now.

"What are you doing?" I snapped at him.

I wasn't sure why I reacted quite so violently. It had something to do with the way I had been so utterly out of control while hunting, so exposed. I had bared for all the world what I truly was, and I hated it. What sane person would want to be a killer?

"Watching out for you," he answered, choosing to respond to my voice rather than my thoughts for once.

Dr Cullen and Esme came through the trees then, emerging either side of Edward. I stood self-consciously, dropping my latest victim and brushing my dress off without looking away from my audience.

"Well done!" Dr Cullen congratulated me. It was totally at odds with what I was feeling, but still a small part of me reacted favourably to the praise.

"What for?" I asked, my voice stiff with the conflict. Theoretically, I knew that I would have to do this in order to survive, so it was imperative that I could... hunt... successfully, and I knew that this was something of a milestone, but I couldn't reconcile the act of killing an innocent creature with approval, let alone congratulations.

"You did very well," he informed me. "You've kept yourself remarkable neat."

I frowned, looked down and shrieked with horror. My dress, admittedly the plainest one that Edward had retrieved for me, was ruined. Bloodstains spattered the bodice and the skirt had dozens, if not hundreds of holes and tears where I must have caught it on trees and vegetation.

"It's alright!" Esme said. "You'll get better with practise. And you're far better than I was on my first hunt—I really was a sight."

I didn't know which disturbed me more: the notion that I could have looked worse or the idea of practise. To save myself the bother of deciding, I clapped a hand to my mouth and twisted my head to examine the full extent of the damage. Then I began to run my fingers through my hair, feeling still more horrified every time another twig tumbled to the ground.

Still, we couldn't stop forever (my mind refused to entertain the possibility that actually, we could) and I didn't even consider changing my clothing out there, so we pressed on. Perhaps inevitably, it began to rain.

"Oh dear," Esme muttered, hugging a bag full of clothes to her chest to prevent them getting wet.

I was a little more exuberant in my protestations. "I hate the rain. It's unpredictable, cold, wet, and always ruins any outdoor events."

Such as a wedding. I wasn't entirely sure how many days had passed since the last day of my life, but I knew that the date I had set must be soon. I didn't ask.

"Though on the bright side, it provides us with water," Dr Cullen quipped.

"Are you always so irritatingly cheerful, Doctor?"

"Call me Carlisle."

It was strange, how I naturally referred to Esme and Edward by their Christian names, but I persisted in labelling the doctor by his title. Then again, not so strange: one did not refer to a man by his given name unless he was either a family member or a close friend. Likewise, I had insisted on him calling me Miss Hale. Hearing how casually he dismissed the social law that confined us to surnames, it suddenly seemed very petty.

"And no, actually, though when you've lived as long as I have you tend to gain a different perspective on things."

That piqued my curiosity, as he must have known it would. "How old are you, Carlisle?"

He smiled, and I almost winced. I didn't want to be close to him. He was a man, and worse, he had changed me, although I would not truly hate him for that until later.

"Almost exactly three centuries," he answered with an affected nonchalance, but my eyes still widened in shock.

"Show off," Esme admonished him fondly.

"Would you like to hear my story, Miss Hale?" he offered. "I'm glad to say it does have a happy ending."

"So far," Edward murmured somewhere ahead of us. I wasn't sure how much cynicism he actually meant to betray with those two words.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second, then decided that it would have to happen sooner or later: "Call me Rosalie."

There, it was done. I had designated myself as part of this unconventional family group. Carlisle and Esme beamed, but before they had a chance to comment, I continued speaking: "And yes, I would be very interested to hear your story."

It covered the best part of an hour, in which time the cursed rain eased off, describing first what little he remembered of his childhood, followed by his transformation and his self-imposed starvation before embarking on a tale worthy of any dreaming fantasist, comprising journeys across far-off lands, meetings with aristocratic and extraordinary people, and his various studies. It seemed there must be nothing this man did not know, and I remarked on that, more than a little jealous.

He laughed. "Ah, but many of these things I learned over a century ago. In many areas I'm sorely out of date, for example with the workings of a motor car. When they first arrived they were so precarious and unreliable that I didn't even consider obtaining one, and then later they were never as practical or as fast as simply running. Now that I've been living in cities and towns, however, a car is almost a necessity, especially as so many own one. Fortunately Edward has a fascination with them or I should never have figured out how to change a wheel, let alone drive one, yet I spent a spell building carriages for the gentry when I was perhaps seventy years old."

Eventually his tale brought him to Chicago at the end of the Great War, and here he paused.

"Tell her what you like," Edward called back. "There's nothing sacred."

Despite his words, Esme gave a delicate shudder. I would later learn that she hated to think of Edward's family dying one by one and leaving him alone in the world, but for now I took it as distaste at Edward being changed. It was not the best way for me to think of this existence, especially combined with my initial pessimistic reaction to it, but Edward did not bother to correct my interpretation. Maybe he had run on ahead, out of earshot.

Carlisle frowned. "As you may have guessed, that was when I found Edward. It was the time of the influenza epidemic."

I remembered this, in the way that a three year old child remembers anything, in vague flashes of images and sensations, and later in the tales that my parents had told me. My father had a chronic fear of illness, so he had confined us all to the house for what my brother George said seemed an eternity. He had been six at the time, and we had driven each other wild in our isolation.

Abruptly, I wondered where George was now. At the bank with my father? Organising my funeral? Would he be assisting with the search for my body? And then: what did George look like? I knew he shared my sky-blue eyes and ivory complexion, and I knew his hair was darker than mine, more like honey than gold, but these were just facts. I tried to picture his face and achieved only a vague, murky image. Already, I had forgotten my brother.

"He was dying in the hospital where I was working. I had been feeling lonely for decades, but I could never justify to myself turning another person into a creature like me. But he was alone in the world; his parents had already succumbed to the disease."

I had never been close to my parents across the bridge of our separate generations, but they were always perfect parents and I was always a perfect daughter. Of course there were times when I chafed at their restrictions on my free time or wished I could attend dinner parties that they had forbidden to me, but my father, also called George, had worked very hard at the bank to provide for us and my mother, Carol, put his wealth to good use, furnishing our home in a chic, fashionable style, acquiring the most stylish of clothing for us, paying for the best education money could buy for George and sending me to a piano tutor, a singing tutor, ballroom dancing lessons. There was nothing more I could ask from them.

"So I took him back to my apartment and changed him. We left as soon as he was able and, after a year of acclimatising to his thirst and his gift, we resumed the lifestyle I had led before, moving across the country."

"What relationship did you claim?" I asked abruptly. Of course I knew by now that Edward was most certainly not Esme's brother, and thinking of my own family had prompted me to wonder what role I would play in this one.

And yet, I didn't want to ask. Not so bluntly, at least. I didn't want to claim I was a sister when I had a true brother still living; I would not be an orphaned protégée when my parents were mourning me worlds away.

"As a matter of fact, we didn't," Carlisle admitted. "Edward disliked crowds, unused as he was to his gift, and tended to avoid people altogether."

This made sense, but did not answer any of my unspoken musings. I let it drop, knowing I had a year's grace before we entered society again.

"Almost three years after I found Edward, we were staying in Ashland, Wisconsin."

At this juncture, he glanced at his wife and I knew this was now Esme's story. Unlike Edward, she did not leave the telling of her tale to Carlisle but stepped up to the challenge herself, although she paused before beginning.

"Like Edward, I was dying when Carlisle found me. Unlike Edward, I was dying of my own volition."

I stopped, and they ran on a few paces in the instant before they stopped with me. Esme was waiting for me to speak, but for a moment I couldn't. The words stayed restive on my tongue even as my lips parted in shock, horror, and worst of all, in remembrance.

Suicide was a sin. I knew that as surely as I knew that murder was wrong. It was for God to create and end life, through whatever medium he so chose, and to change that was to defy Him, and to presume that you knew better. Even if Esme had been prevented from taking her own life, she had been wrong to try to do so, no matter the circumstances.

Another part of my mind wondered what those circumstances were, and how terrible her life must have been.

Yet another train of thought reminded me that, not five days ago, I too had utterly given up on life and that, really I had no right to judge her.

Gently, she took my arm and tugged me onwards.

"Why?" I asked.

Her face was composed, but I could see that she was hiding some violent emotion. "My baby died. He was only three days old."

This threw up a thousand further questions and assumptions, the most pressing being: "But your husband!"

She actually flinched, as though I had slapped her.

"I'm sorry," I said quietly.

"He's not dead," she said, correcting my instinctive presumption. "He's still alive, back in Ohio somewhere."

I glanced at Carlisle now, utterly confused. If she was still married, then how were they together? In what capacity? Clearly they were together; it was obvious in every movement of their bodies, in every look and word that they adored each other. Furthermore, why was Esme so upset at the mention of her human husband? Did she feel guilty at leaving him behind, or finding another?

I didn't want to pose any of these highly personal and probing questions. Where on earth was Edward when his gift might actually be useful?

Carlisle stepped in. "We're not legally married, in the same was that Edward is not actually Esme's brother. We feel that it doesn't really matter."

The implications of that, I decided to ignore. Hadn't I already accepted that they were highly unconventional?

"I walked out on my husband when I was three months pregnant," Esme confessed, but she didn't sound ashamed. Hurt, yes, haunted, yes, but not ashamed. "I'm sorry, I'm not doing this very well; I've never had to explain this to anymore other than Carlisle," she apologised.

"Didn't Edward—"

"He refused to tell him anything. Sometimes he seems so much older than seventeen; he realised that I had to tell him myself. I needed that."

They shared a smile, his protective, hers grateful, then she turned back to me.

"I was married to a man named Charles Evenson when I was twenty-two," she told me.

I noticed that Carlisle's face twitched into a frown at his name.

Esme took a ragged breath before continuing. "I didn't love him, and he didn't love me. It was a marriage of social gain for our families rather than anything else."

Again, a pause. I felt distinctly uncomfortable.

"Suffice to say it was not a happy marriage. He was..."

She didn't need to go on. I could see in my mind Roy's face as he ripped my dress out the way, as he pushed me to the ground; I couldn't taste the drink on his breath as he forced his mouth against mine, cutting off my scream; I could feel him...

"Rosalie!"

Too late, I realised that my lungs were working at the speed of an express train, that my eyes were clamped shut and my arms wrapped around me like a shield.

"Sorry!" I gasped, frantically trying to control myself. I hated being out of control; I was pathetic.

Esme gathered me in her arms, ant to my own surprise I found myself hugging her back, heedless of the blood which I was probably smearing all over her travelling dress.

"Don't be sorry," she whispered fiercely. "Don't ever be sorry. It's been over a decade for me, less than a week for you. I'll help you. We all will."

There, in the middle of nowhere, I learnt three things. The first was what it was like to cry when you had no tears. The second was what it was like to love without a beating heart. The third was that it was possible to find a reason to live as a vampire, even if there had been none as a human.

A/N: Again, an apology, this time that we haven't reached our destination. However, we'll be there next chapter. And another note: the characters might seem a little out of character. Can I point out that this is the first time they've had to deal with an outsider joining their family. Esme in particular has not dealt with her past as well as she has by the time of Twilight because she hasn't been confronted with something like this before. She's never had to really explain herself to anyone besides Carlisle, and he's a completely different case. Ooh, I want to write that... Anyone want me to write that?