A/N: Hello, everyone! Happy Friday.

Yeah, okay. I suck at schedules. Whatever. I'm having trouble with the Trouble chapter, and it's frustrating me. Do me a favor and throw good vibes this way, yeah? Yeah. Okay.

That being said… *holds your hand*

The last straw was his empty clothes hamper. Not only was his hamper empty, but his clothes had been laundered and put away.

Most people would be thrilled, especially after a long day, not have to do laundry. Edward wasn't one of those people, at least not today. Today he was frustrated and bitter-two very useless, maddening emotions. The way Edward typically dealt with useless, maddening emotions was to go on a cleaning rampage.

His house was pristine. The floors were swept or vacuumed. The shelves and tables were dusted. His laundry was done, and he was pretty sure the bathrooms had been cleaned too, even though they didn't need it yet.

"Dinner's ready," Bella called up the stairs, and Edward's blood boiled.

He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, trying to push away the irrational anger. Breathing out in one gust, Edward headed down the stairs. He started to step toward the kitchen intending to help, but then he stopped. Everything was already on the table. Two glasses of water. Napkins. Plates. Utensils. Rice, pork chops, and Bella was already coming out of the kitchen with a salad.

He sat down with a huff and had to work at a small smile. "Everything smells great."

Truth be told, he hadn't eaten this well since he had his mother and father to cook for him. Everything she made was delicious. She'd told him once she'd taken up cooking as a hobby when she was living in her father's house with nothing to do but try to get better.

"Thanks," she said, sitting across from him.

They lapsed into an awkward silence. In the weeks since they'd moved in here, between his parents-who had rented an apartment in Seattle for the duration-and her father, they were rarely alone, and so they were still straddling the line between strangers and… whatever the hell they were supposed to be.

Edward sighed as reached for his water. His movements were jerkier than he wanted, and he ended up knocking over the glass. It fell to the floor; the spectacular crash and splash especially loud in the quiet room.

Bella got up at the same time he did. "I'll get it," she said, already stooping to pick up the shattered bits of glass. He stooped with her and grabbed her wrist a lot rougher than he meant to. She gasped.

"I spilled it; I'll get it." He let her go, wondering with the fuck was wrong with him.

Bella still reached for the glass. "I can help."

"I don't fucking want you to help!" He moved to block her hand, glaring at her. "I'm so fucking sick of this little housewife routine. You're not my fucking housewife. I can cook. I can clean up my messes, and I can wash my own fucking clothes."

He pushed to his feet, heading for the kitchen and the dustpan. He knew he needed to calm down, but Bella was hot on his heels.

"What the hell is your problem right now?"

"I don't have a problem," he said, leaning into the supply closet to grab the broom. He came up short when he turned around to find her standing right behind him. "Can you watch where you're going?" he snapped, brushing past her.

"Yeah, I'll watch where I'm going, when you tell me why the hell you're acting like an asshole," she said, following him back out to the table.

"I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Okay, fine. How about I tell you straight." She reached out, touching his arm so he had to to stop. "Don't grab me like that again. You don't get to manhandle me when you're pissed."

He stared at her, taken aback. This was the Bella who had yelled at him that first night, when she thought he was there to torture her about the daughter she'd feared was dead. Since she'd found out her daughter was alive, Bella had reminded him of a frightened puppy dog cowering in the corner, coming out only tentatively. He couldn't blame her, of course. This whole situation brought out anything but bravery. This Bella, on the other hand, was a tattered pit bull that had survived on the streets, scarred from alley fights and tough as nails.

It caught his attention, like she'd always been able to catch his attention, and tonight, that pissed him off. "Don't be melodramatic," he said, throwing her hand off with a roll of his shoulders. "You think this whole shitstorm needs more drama?"

He started to sweep up the glass, water and all. She stood near him, hands on her hips, and didn't leave him alone. "What the hell is going on here? What's your problem?"

Edward threw the broom and dustpan-glass and all- at the wall. The cacophony of glass was so satisfying he picked up her glass of water from the table and hurled that at the wall too. She jumped, and for some reason, that made him vindictively pleased. He was so angry he didn't know what to do with himself, and seeing her calm and stoic had only pissed him off more.

"You want to know what my fucking problem is? My problem is I'm teaching third graders when I want to be teaching first graders. I'm dependent on my parents again. I'm living with a total stranger and, oh yeah, I have a six-year-old daughter who needs to be angry at someone, and she's chosen me. She'll talk to you. She's getting better with you, but she doesn't like me at all."

Bella flinched. The look on her face, as though she'd been struck, should have been enough to get him to back off. He didn't want to hurt her. He really didn't. He knew. He knew damn well she'd been hurt more than enough for one lifetime, and hadn't he promised her father he would think about that before he did just this?

But he was too angry. Every insecurity, every resentment he'd felt in the last month and a half came flying out. "It's not your fault, right?" he asked, his tone scathing. "That's what we keep telling Katie. It's no one's fault. All five of us are victims of some asshole woman who left you to die so she could play mommy. Except what we don't tell her, what we don't say, is that there was no fucking reason for you to be out there-alone. There was no fucking reason for any of it. Your mom and your stepfather sound like sadistic assholes. Why the hell would you go to them and not me?"

"Fuck you," she said and turned away from him.

He grabbed her by the arm, spinning her back, and she shoved him hard. "I told you not to touch me!" She stumbled backward a few steps, glaring at him, her eyes full of tears but the look in them fierce with hate. "What do you want from me, huh? Yeah, I can see it would have been a great idea to tell you I was pregnant back then." She turned away from him with a scoff. "That's exactly what I needed. More people to hate me."

"If your mother and stepfather hated you so goddamned much, why the hell did you stay with them so long? Who the hell stays with assholes? If you'd run when you were three months pregnant instead of nine, none of this would have happened."

She spun around again, her eyes narrowed. "You know, you and my dad and anyone who knows this fucking story like to remind me my mother is an asshole. And that's great. That's fine. That might be true, but you know what else she is? She's also my fucking mother. And she loved me. She was a shitty mother, but she was the only mother I had. There were some happy times, okay, and fucking excuse me if I thought maybe, just maybe, this could have been one of them. Babies change people. You hear it all the time. They make criminals go straight and drug addicts go clean. They're tiny little miracle workers. That's what I wanted to believe when I was seventeen years old. It was stupid and naive and… just stupid, but I wanted my goddamned mother."

By then, tears were streaming down her face, and Edward's anger had dwindled to a simmer. Really, really, he didn't want to hurt her. If only he wasn't aching himself, looking for someone to pin his frustration on. He huffed. "Bella-"

"No. Shut up. You want to hear this story, you think I owe it to you, fine, but you shut the fuck up." She yanked her chair out and sat down at the table. After a few seconds, he sat across from her.

She was staring straight ahead at nothing; her cheeks flushed, eyes vacant and glassy, and her hands clenched on the table. "It was a cycle. I know that now. Tension builds-that was when everything was horrible in the house, when I was walking on eggshells, when I couldn't do anything right. That was when they were both screaming at me, telling me what an ungrateful, stupid bitch I was. That was when I kept pissing my stepfather off. I was too stupid and too… bad. I knew something was going to happen, and it always did. Always."

Edward's stomach churned, but he kept silent. As horrible as it was to hear, this was knowledge he'd craved, and she'd told him to shut up.

Bella swallowed hard. "After… whatever, things would be okay for a little bit. My mom...when it happened, she always said I deserved it, deserved whatever I got, but afterward she was nice for a while." She scoffed. "They call it the honeymoon phase in therapy. It's part of the cycle of abuse. It's what keeps abuse victims complacent-the good times. She was a good mom for a bit, and things were okay.

"When I got pregnant, after I… When I told you…"

"After you lied to me and left," he said flatly, not wanting to think about that. It was too confusing to be bitter and feel sorry for someone all at once.

Bella's eyes flashed to his. She nodded, and looked away again, wiping a tear from her cheek. "I hid the pregnancy for a long time, as long as I could. Six months, I think. Somewhere around there. But then-"

She sucked in a breath, as though she'd been punched in the gut. Her hands clenched into fists on the table. "Okay. I… my stepfather… I guess what you have to know is that he had a bunch of asshole friends over a lot of the time. His friends were… handsy." She huffed. "My mother always said I must have been egging them on. I don't know. I think I believed her."

"Bella-"

"I don't want to talk about that right now," she blurted. "I'm only telling you so you'll understand the next part. Because one of his friends had his hands on me. I was trying to get away from him. He was trying to put his hands up my shirt, and he felt it."

White hot rage burned through him. It was terrible-one more impotent emotion he couldn't do a damn thing about now-but it had the effect of turning the heat down on his anger at her. Again.

"Anyway. When she found out, my mom thought it was one of my stepfather's friends who had done it. They never got as far as raping me, but she didn't know that. I think on some level she understood what they were doing to me better than I did. She knew she should have been protecting me, and after she figured out I was pregnant, she tried, to some extent anyway. She would tell me about how things would be better. I'd have the baby, and she'd help me.

"I kept waiting for her to help me. I mean… she kept James-my stepfather-off my back for a while. But when I asked her for help with figuring out doctors, getting to the doctor, buying things for the baby, she put me off. She'd say things like if I was feeling fine, there was no need to rush out to the doctor. And of course we'd get things for the baby, but we had time for that.

"Then she started getting angry again, talking about how I was a bitch and a whore. She worked so hard to feed me, and now I wanted things like doctors and a crib. And then James started hitting me again. Little things at first. He'd grab me or slap me, and that was nothing compared to what he used to do."

Edward pushed back from the table, the scrape of the chair across the floor grating in the quiet room. Bella flinched, and Edward turned away, pacing to the window, staring out, needing to expel some of this useless energy roiling inside him.

"The last time he beat me was bad, but the thing that got me to actually leave was that he didn't give a shit that he'd kicked me more than once on my side. I kept screaming that he was going to hurt the baby, and he didn't care. It only made him hit me harder. And I realized that was how it was always going to be. I thought about him doing all those things to my baby-my tiny baby-and I couldn't stay anymore."

Bella sighed. "Maybe I should have run to you, but you were this dream, this fantasy that I'd told myself over and over and over again for months I couldn't have. When I ran, I didn't think about you. I ran to a girl I knew, but her parents called my mom, so I ran again. I wasn't really thinking about anything except I had to get away, get where they couldn't reach me, because if I didn't, James would hurt me again. Or Mom would convince me it could all be better, and I'd believe her. I'd believe her, and then James would hurt my baby."

Her words snuffed the last of his anger out, and Edward hung his head. His throat was tight, and his mouth dry. What the hell had he thought he was doing adding to her heartache when there was more than enough to go around?

"I'm sorry," he said, his voice cracked and raw. "I didn't mean any of those things I said."

"Yes, you did."

"No, I didn't." He turned around and walked back to the table, sitting down next to her instead of across from her. She drew back, as though getting as far away from him as she could while she was still on the chair, but she didn't leave, and she wasn't looking at him like she hated him. "I really didn't. Those weren't things I wanted to say."

"They were things you've thought."

"Yeah. I'm only human, Bella. My daughter. Our little girl. She doesn't trust you yet, and she hates me."

"She doesn't hate you."

"No." Edward bowed his head, but his lips quirked briefly up. The last few visits, Katie had begun to interact with him in spite of herself. She did it almost by accident, answering his questions or going to show him something she was playing with before she remembered she was supposed to be pissed at him. And really, she was displacing. They-Emmett and Jasper-had figured out she was really angry at herself, because she'd been the one who played the genetics game. She'd been the one fascinated by the fact she could be related to anyone.

In reality, since she thought her biological mother was dead, she'd been searching for her biological father all along without realizing what that meant. She was pissed as hell now that she'd caught him, and she was displacing her anger.

Maybe his daughter was more like him than he'd thought.

"No, she doesn't hate me, and I do believe things will be okay in the end." He rubbed his eyes, suddenly very tired. "It's just the getting there. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken it out on you. We're supposed to be partners in this."

"But we're strangers," she said, finishing his thought.

He was quiet for a moment, trying to figure out if there was any point to saying what he was thinking out loud. But then, he thought of how much it must have cost her to tell him about her stepfather, her mother, and why she'd willingly chosen to stay with monsters over telling him he was going to be a father. That was a lot to cop to, and he could give her this much. "Are we strangers? I know we're both different. We've changed, but we're not that different, are we?"

"I lied to you."

"About going to school at Stanford."

"And about my age." Her eyes were sharp on him, so she caught his grimace before he smoothed out his features. "You wouldn't have liked the real me. You wouldn't have even given the real me the time of day, let alone talked to me."

You talked to me, and I loved you for it, she'd said.

"I'm not going to pretend it's comfortable to think I got you pregnant when you were sixteen or barely seventeen," he said, frowning. "But even that is beside the point now. The point is you didn't make up the way we were together. You made me think. You made me happy."

She ducked her head, but she didn't argue.

"Bella, haven't you ever wondered how I ended up in Seattle?"

She peered at him. "You applied a lot of places, you said. You got a job here."

"Yeah, but I also got a job in Chicago where my family lives. And why did I apply here at all?" He reached out to touch her hand, and she didn't pull away. "Do you remember when we were… friends we used to talk about your father?"

She looked down again, but there was a smile playing at her lips. "I think you were more obsessed with the idea he existed than I was."

Edward didn't think that was true. Even then, he'd thought that Bella was in denial about how curious she was about her father, but now wasn't the time to bring that up. "Yeah. The one thing you did know, except that your mother said he was nice, was that he probably lived in Washington."

She looked up at him from underneath her eyelashes. "You looked up Forks because you didn't believe there could really be a town called that."

A tremor went through him at the memory. They'd been stretched out side by side on his bed, his laptop in front of them. He remembered he'd never been so aware of another human being. She was warm, and she smelled good. He remembered how much he wanted to know what it would feel like to kiss her, to have her body underneath him.

When he spoke again, his voice was gruff. "I wanted to take you here. To Washington, I mean. I wanted to walk on First Beach and go to the top of the Space Needle. I used to think about it all the time."

As he spoke, her eyes grew wider. "Really?"

"Yeah." He raised a hand, briefly pressing the pad of his thumb to her chin before dropping it back down to his lap. "I cared for you. You weren't the only one who used to daydream."

She was quiet a moment, looking at her hands before she spoke. "And now you hate me."

"I don't hate you."

"Yeah. That's what this was all about. You not hating me."

He ran his hand over his eyes. "I could never hate you. Not then, and especially not now. You're my daughter's mother. Even if you were the most malicious person on the planet, hating you wouldn't be an option, but that's just semantics." He reached for her hand again, and he wasn't surprised when she pulled away, pulling them off the table and onto her lap. He sighed. "The things I said were stupid, and I especially shouldn't have grabbed you like that. That was what made you angry, wasn't it? The grabbing."

She shrugged. "I knew you were in a mood. Once upon a time moods like that didn't end well for me. You were making me nervous, and when you grabbed me, it was either get pissed or get scared." She looked up at him, pinning him with a fierce look. "I'm never going to be scared like that again in my life."

It was a warning and a threat. He nodded. "It's not going to happen again. It was a bad moment."

She turned her head, looking out the window. "That I understand." When she turned back, her look was gentler and more uncertain. "The therapy helps, you know. Anger is harder to control than you think."

He chuffed, but he nodded. "You're right. I've been putting it off for too long." Besides couples therapy to help them learn how to best help their daughter transition, Edward had been the only one of the four adults not to start therapy. Obviously that wasn't going to fly.

Bella gave him a tentative smile, as though she was surprised he'd been so receptive. "I am sorry, you know. I'm sorry we all have to go through this because I made such stupid choices."

He knew that, of course. He knew damn well no one blamed Bella more than she blamed herself. But she'd been a kid, an abused child who hadn't understood she had options. A mother and father were supposed to love their children unconditionally. If they couldn't, why should anyone else so much as care about her? She didn't dare hope Edward would care for her if her mother couldn't, so she'd run for the one variable in her own private math equation.

It wasn't her fault. It all made sense in the warped mess that had been her reality in the time. Every choice she'd made in that vacuum was rational. "I forgive you," he said. He'd forgiven her a long time ago for everything. It was just hard to say it out loud because he was wounded, and of everyone, he got to express that the least. Still, he said it because he knew she needed to hear it. Sure enough, she closed her eyes, and a single tear dropped from the corner of her eyelashes. "Do you forgive me for the things I said?"

When she opened her eyes, the look he saw there was conflicted, but the corners of her lips turned up in a small smile. She sniffled. "I think I can forgive you. Just maybe not tonight."

"That's more than fair." He looked around the table, at the now-cold meal. "Are you hungry?"

Her expression turned rueful, and she shook her head.

He sighed. "Yeah. Me either."

She started to grab for the dishes, ready to put them away, but he held his hand out in a stopping motion. "Why don't you let me?" he asked.

Her lips turned ever so slightly downward. "I'm not playing pretend, you know. Being a housewife isn't really something I want for myself. I'm just trying to be productive, to bring something to the table."

"I know that. I'd imagine it's frustrating to be looking for work when you already had a job. Just let me this once. It helps me clear my head."

At that, the storm in her eyes calmed. "I get that."

Bella retreated to her room, and Edward set about the business of cleaning up the table. It had the desired effect of draining some of the terrible energy that itched under his skin. It calmed the maddening frustration that he couldn't make any of this right with a snap of his fingers.

As much as that whole conversation had just sucked, Edward was relieved. The tension of the words they hadn't been saying to each other had dissipated. Yeah, he wished like hell it had come out differently, but regardless, it was out. Now they could deal with it, and with luck, they could move forward. They could become what they would be to each other.

What the hell that was, what he wanted it to be, Edward still had no clue.

A/N: Okay guys. Real quick personal note.

To everyone who has supported my original fiction, thank you! :) I can't tell you how much all your support, fanfiction or original fiction, means to me.

If you have read any of my books, if I might implore you to leave a review on Amazon. It's really important to small-time authors like me. Some venues won't even think about letting me advertise unless i have a certain amount of reviews. Links to my books are in my profile.

Anyway. Enough of that. I'm making it my goal to update every one of my stories and finish Oblivious by the time I leave on Saturday next week. I'm going on a cruise. :D Since it's in Alaska, I'm hoping to manage a few updates from sea, but ya know, I might be too busy ogling whales.

Thanks again for all your support. Mwah!