A/N: And, we're back!

Almost as soon as Bella had gotten Melody loose from her carseat and set her on the ground, the little girl spotted her gigantic uncle. "Melody!" Bella barely grabbed her by her hood before she dashed across the parking lot .

"I want Uncle Emmy." Melody strained, her arms out.

Emmett was over to them in several long strides. "You can't be running into traffic, baby," he said, scooping the little girl up into his arms. He hugged her tight. "I think we've had enough accidents, don't you?"

Bella stepped to his side as he shifted Melody and opened an arm to her. She shuddered, melting into his brief but tight hug. Then, she put a little space between them as an intimidating blond came to stand beside him.

"This is my Rose," Emmett said, his smile big as he looked to the blond. "Rosalie, this is Bella and my Melody." He gave the little girl a big smooch on the cheek.

For the first time since the night before, Melody giggled. "Are you Uncle Emmy's lady?"

Rosalie seemed to melt, her hard expression softening as she caressed Melody's hair. "He's my man."

Melody reached out to trace her fingers over the tattoos that peeked out from under Rosalie's jacket—a vine along her hand that ended in an ornate rose on her ring finger. "Oooo," she said reverently.

Bella offered a hand. "I heard you had a showdown with Esme. I'd have paid good money to see that."

Rosalie's lips twitched up at one corner. "Yes, well. Someone had to tell them just how far their heads are up their asses."

"Ooh." Melody looked at Emmett. "Emmy, your lady said a bad word."

Emmett flashed her a grin. "What can I say? Sometimes Rosie is a bad, bad girl."

Rosalie rolled her eyes. "Sorry," she said to Melody with a nod at Bella. "They drive me a little nuts. This one I understand." She gestured at Emmett. "He put them through the wringer, and he's annoying too." She smirked at him. "But Edward? I know I never met him before all this, but it sounds like he's done everything he can to be a good man."

Melody furrowed her brow, obviously perplexed at the conversation. "My daddy is a good boy." Her lip trembled. She was sensitive to everything about her father at the moment.

Emmett bounced her on his hip and Rosalie was quick to put a hand to her back. "That's exactly right. Of course he is."

By then, Charlie had joined the little party. After another round of introductions, Emmett lifted Melody up onto his broad shoulders. The sound of her laughter was a balm to Bella's aching heart.

They chatted for a few minutes, deciding the logistics of how this was going to happen. Edward's parents wanted to talk to Bella and meet Melody. Bella wasn't about to let the latter happen until she'd heard what they had to say. They'd already made her daughter cry. Hell if she was going to let them do it again.

Melody was none too pleased about the prospect of being separated from her mother and uncle. She was cajoled into cooperation when Rosalie promised to show her all her tattoos. Always one to press her luck, Melody negotiated until Rosalie further promised to let her try on her rings. When Rosalie said she could see the rings only if she had breakfast, Melody agreed to go to the hospital cafeteria with her new favorite aunt and her grandfather.

"There's only two people allowed at a time in the ICU," Emmett explained as they walked in that direction. "My parents are going to let you and Mel sit with Edward. That's a foregone conclusion no matter what, but they have a few things to say first."

Bella bristled. "They want a lecture? An interrogation?"

"No." Emmett rubbed the back of his neck, wiggling his snakebite piercing—one of his nervous tics. "They know they owe you an explanation about the last four years, Bell. Especially after what Mom did to you." He scoffed. "Rosalie made sure she understood exactly what she'd cost you."

He shrugged. "I don't know. They're mixed up about a lot of things. But they know their kid could die with all this bad blood between them." He swallowed hard. "And they know if he does die like this, you'll probably never let them see Mel. They know all that."

"He's not going to die," Bella said through gritted teeth. Her heart was pounding way too hard.

"I know. No. I think…" Emmett made an exasperated noise. "Sorry. You know I'm not great with words. I didn't mean it like that."

Bella took a steadying breath. "I know. I just… I can't imagine it even in theory. The world without him. It's impossible. He has to wake up."

Emmett stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. "He's gonna pull through. He is. I'm just saying, this isn't about Mom and Dad wanting to yell at you or anything like that. They aren't evil, you know? They never hated Edward or Melody or you. Just...things got so twisted."

"Yeah, well, I'm warning you now I'm giving this civility thing exactly one chance. If they so much as look at me wrong, they'll be lucky to get only yelling." She flexed her fists at her sides. "They made my baby cry, Emmett. They made her scream for her father."

"That was never what we wanted."

Bella whirled around coming face to face with Esme and Carlisle Cullen. She'd never seen Edward's father in person, but the fact they shared features—the shape of their mouths and the set of their eyes—infuriated Bella just then. At the sight of them, she forgot about civility. "That wasn't your intention? You never wanted Edward to be her father. This is what you always wanted, isn't it? To get us away from him."

Esme's eyes went from pained to something harder. "Isn't that what you said you wanted? For him to stay with us while you walked away with his child?"

"Walk away with his child," Bella repeated scathingly. "I was pregnant. Anywhere I had to go, she came with me, but I never tried to keep her away from him. I wanted him to have whatever he wanted out of his life. Whether he stayed with you or found a way to follow me, I never tried to keep him away from his daughter."

"Hey!" They all turned to see an intimidating looking nurse making her way to them looking not best pleased. "This is a hospital. Whatever this is, take it outside."

Carlisle stepped forward, putting a hand on his wife's arm. "No. It's fine." He looked at Bella, his eyes apologetic. "We got off on the wrong foot. Can we talk? Calmly?"

Bella clenched her jaw. She had about a thousand not-at-all-calm things to say to these people, but he she had to remind herself getting to Edward was her end game. Getting kicked out of the hospital wasn't going to help anything. She nodded at Carlisle, grateful when Emmett stepped to her side as they walked down the corridor.

They found a small, empty waiting room and took the most unobtrusive corner, knowing it was likely to fill up any second.

"It's hard to know where to start," Carlisle said. "It's been hard to understand the reality of Edward's situation from what little contact we've had with him the last few years."

Bella's temper flared again. "Because you've never believed the truth. He told you. He never tried to hide it from you."

"That's clear now," Esme said. "Reporters tracked us down. He saved someone's life. He and his friends work at the National Park."

"If you'd bothered to talk to him for years, you would know what he was doing."

"We've tried. We never cut ties with him," Carlisle said.

"I don't know what the last few years have looked like to you. We can only explain things as they happened from our perspective, for what it's worth. Not as an excuse. If we had it all to do again…" He shook his head. "Our son was nineteen when you met him. With not even a high school diploma to his name. When we bailed Edward out of prison and paid for his defense, there were rules and consequences he agreed to. We would pay for him to go to school nearby, and he was welcome to live at home as long as he was moving forward, putting his life back together. Edward broke our trust once, and that was all the chance we were going to give him. He knew he had to earn it back."

"An accidental pregnancy isn't committing another crime."

"No, but running away from his only support system and the tools he needed to rebuild his life at the whim of another woman—"

"I didn't ask him for anything," Bella said through gritted teeth.

Carlisle raised a hand, his expression again apologetic. "I realize that. But we don't know you. Edward really didn't know you at the time. He didn't think you would try to pull anything on him, but all we had was his word."

"And that wasn't good enough." Bella flexed her fists, irritated. "I know what you wanted for him. I don't blame you for wanting him to stay where he was, to put his life back together where you could help him more easily, but trying to be where his kid was isn't the same thing as running off with some random woman."

Esme sighed. "No, and I wish we could have believed it was just that. When he ran away with that other woman, he had good intentions then too. She made him a criminal. She got him into drugs. And then, when he came to us about you, he was panicked. Erratic. What were we supposed to think?" She offered a sad smile. "Your child is very young. She can't be anything other than innocent. I hope you'll never have to see the day when you had to come to the same realization that we did." She took a shaky breath. "That almost every word that came out of your child's mouth was a lie or a manipulation. That every time you believed him, you enabled him, allowed his disease to dig its way further into him."

"But that was me," Emmett said, his voice quiet. "Edward was never an addict."

"Why couldn't it be Edward? Would he really have told us if he was doing the drugs he was accused of having on him?" Carlisle asked. "Edward's problems were his own. It wasn't anything to do with you, Emmett. We didn't have the luxury of naivety, and we knew for a fact Edward was already mixed up in some pretty bad things. How could we know the kind of people he still kept contact with even if he wasn't doing them himself?"

"But you couldn't have thought he made Melody up to manipulate you," Bella said. "You met me." The words came out bitterly, and Esme had the decency to look ashamed. "She was a total accident. An innocent accident on both our parts. And I know he sent you pictures when she was born."

Esme and Carlisle exchanged a sad look. "I know, after everything, you probably won't believe this, but having a grandchild we couldn't know out there has been a constant heartache," Esme said. "It was Edward's choice to keep us at a distance when we wouldn't give him the money he wanted. Before he asked, we talked about her. We were always willing to be her grandparents. To know her, and to be a part of Edward's life, of course. But when we wouldn't bail him out of the financial problems he claimed to have, he hung up and ignored our calls after that."

"Manipulators don't hesitate to use their children as leverage," Carlisle said. "Of course we would love her. We love our sons. That's what makes saying no to them so impossible. When Edward called us the last time, it sounded to us exactly like our worst fears. He was just trying to take care of his daughter, he said."

"That was true," Bella shot back, frustrated.

"But again, how could we know that? After everything we went through with Emmett and then with Edward, we were cautious. You can say we were too cautious. In hindsight, I would agree with you, but we lived a very different reality with Edward than you have. We go to support groups for family members of addicts and criminals. It happens a lot. We would get to know and love Melody, and he has the ability to yank her away, not let us see her, if we don't give him whatever he wants. We chose not to start down that road."

"Edward would never do something like that."

"That's what we thought about Emmett, and it took almost losing him to get us to change our minds." Esme sighed, putting a palm to her forehead. "This is all very tangled. Look, it's easy to say we would have made different choices if we knew then what we know now. If we'd all been calmer—Edward and both of us—things would have been different. But he was panicked and unsure about everything, talking in terms of things he hadto do, not things he wanted. He didn't know which way was up, and we were desperate to keep him with us, where we knew we could help him figure everything out."

Bella well remembered the wide-eyed boy Edward had been. Hadn't that been what she told him over and over? Not to choose to give up his life out of a feeling of responsibility?

It had been a gamble for all of them—Bella trusting Edward, and Edward making a decision to destroy the life his parents were helping him build in favor of starting from scratch to be there for his daughter. There were no guarantees. If Bella had been a different person, she could have made his life a nightmare, making it difficult for him to see his child or taking him for every penny of child support she could even while he was struggling to put food in his own mouth.

"It was hard to know how to come back from everything after all these years," Carlisle said, picking up the story. "We knew from Emmett that Edward was alive and supposedly doing well. We tried calling for a year after that last time, and he never answered."

Bella's heart panged. Edward had been angry and hurt.

Esme took a shaky breath. "Yesterday, we shut everybody out until we could figure out what was going on. I… I don't know that I can say I'm sorry for that." Her eyes pinched at the corners. "After years of silence...that girl who called. She didn't make a lot of sense." She rolled her eyes to the ceiling, shaking her head. "Which, now that I think about it, is understandable. Edward is a mess, and she was sure he was going to die. Seeing something like what happened to him must have…" Her voice cracked.

"She sounded like she was on drugs," Bella said, putting two and two together.

"It took awhile before we really understood how he ended up here," Carlisle said, his arm wrapped around his wife. "We hadn't seen our son in years. We didn't want to deal with Edward's friends, but we didn't know you were here with your daughter. By the time you arrived, we had asked the nurses not to bother us." Now, his voice shook. "They thought, for a time, that he was going to die. We wanted those last moments. We just wanted to be with him. Just family."

"We're his family," Bella said, shaken by the thought of watching Edward, not knowing if he was going to slip into oblivion.

Wiping away her tears, Esme nodded. "We know that." She took a deep breath. "We wanted to clear the air for better or worse. That was the point of this. You can be with Edward. I'm sure his daughter being there will help him find his way back to all of us again." Her voice shook, and she looked away, swallowing hard. "We…"

When his wife couldn't finish, Carlisle stepped in. "You have every right to be angry, and if that means you don't want us to know Melody, we understand that. But we'd like to. Know her. Meet her."

Bella gnashed her teeth, looking away from them. She wanted a lot of things, not the least of which was to tell them they could go straight to hell if they thought they were ever getting near her daughter after what they'd pulled the day before.

But, rationality set in. Even when he did wake up—and he was going to, she was sure—Edward had a long hospital stay ahead of him. Who knew how long she would have to share a space with Esme and Carlisle. There was no way Melody wouldn't figure out they were important somehow.

She let out a long breath, taking a moment to smile at Emmett who rubbed her back soothingly. Finally, she looked across to Carlisle and Esme. "I honestly don't know what Edward would want in this situation. His relationship with you has always been his business, and I only have your side of how everything between you happened.

"What I do know is that Edward needed you years ago. When he was trying to figure out how to be a father, he shouldn't have had to rely on myfather to help him when it was you he wanted. My dad's been filling your shoes for a long time now."

They didn't argue, and that went a long way to calm Bella down. "But for now, since we can't exactly ignore each other, yes, you can meet Melody. But I'm telling you now, if Edward wakes up and he doesn't want you to see her, what he says goes."

"That's fair," Carlisle said after a long, tense moment. His voice was rough. "That's more than fair."

~0~

The nurse offered to prepare Melody for what she was going to see before they walked into Edward's ICU room. Bella gratefully accepted. They both listened, Bella's stomach twisting in horror.

Nothing could have prepared her for the reality. She let the nurse talk to Melody softly, urging her not to be afraid to touch her daddy and talk to him. Inwardly, Bella reeled.

Edward's head was bandaged. His face was a mess of cuts and bruises, grotesquely puffed up. His left arm was in a cast. There were tubes and wires everywhere. It seemed every inch of his exposed skin was either scraped or bruised. His chest rose and fell with each pump of the machine that breathed for him.

Melody began to weep, and that snapped Bella out of her stupor. She hugged her daughter close, hardly able to breathe past the lump in her throat.

"There are too many ows to kiss," Mel whispered brokenly.

Bella squeezed her eyes shut, twin tears trailing down her cheeks. She took a deep breath as she settled them both in the chair at his side. She held Mel steady as the little girl kissed him anyway—a gentle, tiny thing.

"Just talk to him, Mel. You can tell him anything you want. He can hear you," Bella encouraged.

"Even though he's sleeping?"

"It's a special sleep. Like being lost in the fog." Bella remembered what Carlisle had said. "If you talk to him, maybe it'll help him find his way back."

So, Melody talked. And asked questions, wondering if he was always going to look like this. Bella did her best to answer. She knew a lot of what they could see would heal. His arm, even his crushed chest were relatively easy to fix and heal.

The problem now was his head. The swelling was going down, which was a good sign, but there was no telling what could be damaged. When he woke up—when, not if, she had to believe that—any number of things could be wrong.

They could only tell him that they were there and that they loved him.

"Come back to us," Bella whispered near his ear. "We need you."

A/N: I really intended to resolve things quicker than this. Back to the drawing board. Don't worry. My alien unit seems very comfortable where she is. I'll be back ASAP with the next chapter.

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