-| Glitch continues |-

Everything is dark, but a different kind of dark—the worst kind of dark.

A dark without Edward.

Last thing I remember is screaming. Screaming and screaming. And blood. Blood in the palm of my hand. Bloody fingerprints on my shirt.

Now, there's light, a bright light. You can't see in the dark, but you can't see in this light, either.

I'm on my back, a position in which I find myself often. I feel twigs and rocks digging into the skin of my thighs, the forest bed anything but soft. Someone is touching me with frigid fingers—the inside of my wrist, my forehead, my neck. The person helps me sit up because no one likes seeing people on the ground. My back presses against something as chilled and firm as the trunk of a denuded tree.

I don't think it's a tree.

"Bella."

Someone's saying my name again. Someone's shining light in first one eye, then the other. The light is so bright, I can see only a dark outline of the person's face.

"Charlie! Jacob!" the someone calls, and I can feel the vocal vibrations in my back. Definitely not a tree. "Over here!"

I hear answering shouts of relief and the sound of footfalls thrashing through the undergrowth in our direction. The flashlight is blinding, but there's something about the person holding me that is overwhelmingly familiar.

It's not the cold, hard torso or the icy hands or the smooth voice.

It's the smell.

The person holding me smells strongly of sweet and fresh and sun. Sunlight doesn't really smell, I know this. Yet the sun's rays are so visually beautiful—fragmenting shards of glass, fracturing in the depths of diamond, dancing on water's surface—that its lack of smell seems such a waste.

This smell is what I imagine as sun. It's not fire or carbon or sulfur. It's a smell I've smelled my whole life at unexpected moments, like when I walk into my room after being away at school. It's a smell I would know anywhere.

I whisper, "Edward?"

My vocal chords are so raw that no mortal should have been able to discern the words coming from my lips. But the person lowers the flashlight and peers close, close enough for me to see a pale, ethereal face. Close enough to see the gleam of warm, intelligent eyes.

"No," the man says. "It's Carlisle. And you're going to be just fine."

The next hour passes in a blur of lights—dancing flashlights, blaring headlights, racing fluorescent lines in the ceiling tiles above me. My beleaguered brain informs me that a gurney is spiriting me through the familiar halls of the Forks Medical Center.

I have an entourage of worried family and friends. They escort me to the cut-off point, some barking questions, some answers, some crying. Jacob is there, too, and he just looks at me like he does. His dark eyes, usually dancing with light and life, are dead.

A pair of nurses in matching blue—not white—scrubs tag team hooking me up to this machine and that. They pad efficiently away in their rubber-soled shoes, and then it's just me and the doctor. He's thrown a white coat over a casual sweater and jeans, a departure from his usual crisp shirt and tie. I'm well aware of his penchant for snappy dressing, as I've spent more than my share of time at the Forks Medical Center. Dr. Cullen has regularly set my bones and stitched my skin since he and his wife moved to town several years ago.

Would it be weird if I asked him to step closer so I can smell his arm? Edward's scent is the only thing keeping me sane.

The good doctor asks me the standard head trauma questions (how many fingers is he holding up), checks some readouts (heart rate is slightly elevated), and makes precise notes on his charts. I tell him that I merely got lost in the woods, that I encountered no rabid animals, and that all of my limbs and organs seem to be accounted for.

He hums and flips through the tome of my past medical history. Something only a few pages in, something recent, gives him pause. He stares down at the page with an emotion akin to surprise. His expression never wavers from his standard professional mask, but there's something about his eyes—

My chart flips shut.

I'd bet money it just informed him I have an incurable mental disorder.

"How are you sleeping?" he asks.

This question, it's not standard.

I would know.

"Fine."

The non-standard questions continue. Am I having trouble enjoying my regular activities? Do I feel inexplicably sad? Maybe it's just my imagination, maybe it's my recent trauma, my paranoia, my schizophrenia, maybe all of the above, but I'm convinced he knows something. I look directly at him as I answer his questions, right in the eyes, as though they're hidden gold mines I could pillage if I only had the right tools.

I answer no and no, but I mean no, I'd be enjoying my regular activities just fine, thanks, if I were allowed to participate in them and no, I know exactly why I'm feeling sad. It's not inexplicable in the slightest.

Then he asks me the hardest question of all.

"Have you ever thought about killing yourself?"

This time, I'm the one who looks away.

"No." This time, he's the one who looks steadily into my face, trying to gauge its secrets. "No," I repeat. "I would never…"

I can't finish that.

"Good," he says and smiles a final, sad smile. "Rest now."

I do.

I grab sleep before visiting hours. Charlie is first in line at 7:00 a.m. on the dot. I'm grateful, so grateful, that Renee still waits outside.

"What were you thinking?" Charlie demands as soon as the door's closed. But his voice trembles slightly, as though his anger is perched on a ledge and could rapidly descend into sorrow.

"I…wasn't."

"You know better than to wander around in the woods alone."

"Yes."

My calm answer confuses him. "Did you just get lost?"

"Yeah." If you count getting lost on purpose. "How did you find me?"

He sighs and sits on the visitor's chair, leaning forward and stroking his mustache, something he only does when he's worried.

"We almost didn't. We were looking down toward the reservation when Renee happened to find your note."

Um.

"My note?" I ask faintly.

"Yes."

I hold myself very, very still.

"Can I see it?"

Charlie looks at me oddly. "Yeah, it's on the kitchen table at home." He looks at me even more oddly when the bleep of the nearby heart monitor increases from a steady canter to a riotous gallop.

For you see, I didn't leave a note.

I'm nearly delirious from my screaming match against silence and my overnight stay in the earthy Forests of Forks Hotel. Mostly, though, I'm delirious with glee.

Edward has slipped up at last. Even though he'd somehow had the willpower to keep from showing himself to me in the forest, he hadn't been able to abandon me completely. He'd faked a note so that my parents would eventually discover where I'd gone. He couldn't leave me to die out there after all, lost and alone.

I can't wait to get out of this hospital.

I smile weakly and nod at everything the nurses say. I hold out my arm obligingly for them to take my blood pressure, my blood, my pulse. I'm the epitome of willing, helpful, completely healed patient. Heck, if they'd asked me to, I would have dropped my pants and peed into a two-inch cup with the entire hospital staff watching.

Half a day later, with a warning to my parents about making sure I drink enough fluids and that they wake me up that night every hour on the hour, Dr. Cullen at last signs my release forms.

I can't wait to get home.

An orderly wheels me out in a chair because it's hospital policy. Everything's so tall; I feel like an Oompa Loompa. This must be how Billy feels. This must be me in shock. My heart rate monitor, were it still mine, would be morse-coding all over the place.

As we're leaving, I hear Dr. Cullen murmur, "And Renee? She needs to see someone about this."

"She will." My mom's voice is grim.

I ignore the exchange, not caring what person Renee will find for me to see next. All that matters is that I see Edward. Or, at least, the work of Edward's hands.

The drive home in Charlie's car is excruciatingly slow. It is also excruciatingly…beautiful. It's a whole new world. Colors are brighter, smells are sweeter, even the air is cleaner. My eager eyes and ears and nose drink everything in like it's my first morning on earth. A world with Edward in it is a world a thousand times more lovely, more alive, more worth living in.

When we round the corner to reveal the Swan homestead with its peeling white paint and sagging front porch, I almost laugh with joy.

Edward has been in that house, under that roof. Edward has stepped across that sagging porch and through that front door. Edward's feet have stood on the yellowed linoleum of the kitchen floor. Edward's hand has pressed a pen to paper on our kitchen table. Edward's fingers have directed said pen in a rough approximation—or perhaps an exact replica, who knows?—of my handwriting.

I've never wanted to see my own handwriting more.

Finally—finally—I will have visible, tangible proof that Edward exists.

Even if no one will believe me that I didn't write the note; even if they think I had just forgotten writing it or I'm so desperate to prove I'm not crazy that I will use even the poorest of excuses.

Even then.

I will know.

I will know.

I don't care if the note is written on a dirty, crumpled piece of trash plucked from the nearby garbage can in the ugliest handwriting on the planet. I don't care if the note was written on an old gum wrapper with a chewed piece of gum in it. That puppy is going to be placed in a gilded frame and hung right above my bed.

When Renee helps me out of the car, I breathe the air that Edward had breathed. I walk along the same sidewalk that Edward had walked. I step inside the same door, round the same corner, and look into the same kitchen.

But when I see what is on the kitchen table, I stop. For what is on the kitchen table is not a note at all.

Not a note.

It's my notebook.

Feeling the world turn to gray and ash around my ears, I pounce.

It's my little red notebook, and it lies on the kitchen table open to the final entry that I had written yesterday morning. The entry in which somehow, in all my meaningless scribble, I mention that I'm going to go on a walk north of town. The entry that trails off abruptly with a long, violent streak of red pen when I had become frustrated with my train of thought and decided to start my walk earlier than planned. And planned to do something entirely new on my walk.

But at least it is the same little red notebook that I had most assuredly not left on the kitchen table. That fact is enough to keep my hope alive, and I cling to that hope like a rope on a sheer cliff. I look up to see Renee and Charlie hovering together in the doorway of the kitchen, watching me warily.

"Was the notebook here when you found it?" I ask Renee. I ask her this conversationally, as though I'm commenting on the fact that the weather in Forks is often dark and wet.

She shakes her head. "No, it was upstairs, on your bed."

Exactly where I had left it.

"Where on the bed?" I demand, wondering if I will be able to tell from her memory of its location whether it had been moved.

"What is this about?" she's tentative, tremulous.

I whirl and hit the refrigerator with the palm of one hand, hard enough to cause various fridge photos to fall to the floor. "Just tell me where it was on the friggin' bed!"

Renee just looks at me, wide eyes filling with tears. "Honey, I don't know; it was on the bed."

I look at a fallen picture on the floor, me sitting on a couch, sandwiched between both of my parents.

"I need you," I say, emphasizing each word carefully through clenched teeth, "to tell me exactly where on the bed."

Charlie and Renee are looking alarmed. They are looking worried. They are looking at me like I'm crazy.

"Bella," Renee says carefully, her voice wobbling only slightly through her tears. "The notebook was on your bed, on top of the covers, right near your pillow."

Exactly where I had left it.

I think.

I can't be sure.

In my hurry to get out of the house, I had just kinda tossed it. I don't remember where it landed on the bed. I don't remember if it landed opened or closed.

I don't remember.

My parents watch me wither up and die.

"Thanks," I say in a monotone. "That's all I needed to know."

I clutch the little red notebook to my chest like it's the last available life saver on a sinking Titanic. I turn toward the stairs. "I'm going to my room now."

Charlie and Renee just nod, slowly, like they're in shock. They don't try to stop me. As I walk away from them, I notice that Renee is clutching Charlie's hand, the hand on which still rests his wedding ring. I notice that his other hand is stroking her back, eventually drawing her into a hug.

Well.

At least some good is coming of this.

In their worry over me, my parents seem to be getting along just fine. Who knows, maybe my sinking to a new level of crazy will allow them to reconnect on a new emotional level. Maybe they'll realize what they've been missing all these years and will re-affirm their vows on the eve of their original seventeenth anniversary.

Maybe they will dance on my grave.