Chapter nine

My heart.

It did things the human heart should not be capable of doing.

It leaped, it stopped, it raced; it fell to my toes and jumped to my throat while the entire time, my body stayed still.

"Take me there."

"Bella, wait-" Renee said, holding up her hand and still listening to the TV.

"Take me there," I demanded again, my own eyes glued to the television where strangers with their palms pressed to their ears and their heads nodding at disembodied voices were telling me all about Edward.

"We're hearing that his parents arrived at the station just minutes ago. Charlie Swan, the Chief of Police for Forks, will give a press conference just as soon as things are clear, but we do know Edward Cullen is found and he's alive."

"Has anyone seen him, Anne? Do we have any idea of his whereabouts for the past twenty-two months?"

"No, Dan, we don't, but you know, it's so rare for a missing person to just turn up safe and alive after so long. At this point, everything suggests a case of a runaway," she said.

"No," I said. "He didn't do that. He didn't do that."

He did not put me through hell for almost two years.

He wouldn't.

"Bella..." my mom started, this worried look in her eyes.

"No way," I said, standing on my shaky legs. "No. Take me there."

The news feed cut to our strangely familiar town. It was so odd seeing it on the national news.

How did they get here so quickly? They'd all left the day Charlie called off the search.

How was he here after so long? So, so, so long.

A loop was being run of Carlisle Cullen, his arm over Esme, both of them jogging to the front doors of the station with Marks out front, holding the door open, shouting "No Comment!" at the reporters gathered there.

"We wouldn't even be able to get in, Bella," my mom said, but her keys were in her hands.

"You're married to the chief!" I hollered, crying but laughing, my head spinning.

Then the house phone started to ring.

I jumped and lunged for it, like he'd just be calling me.

"Oh my god!" Jessica screeched as soon as I picked up. "Oh my god!"

"What do you know?" I breathed out, panting into the receiver.

"Oh my god!" Jessica screeched again.

"I'm going up there," I said, then hung up the phone, but as soon as I did, it rang again.

On instinct, I picked up.

"Did you see him?" Rose asked. "Did you see him? He's so different, but it's him! It's him! Oh God, Bella-"

"Where did you see him?" I yelled, lunging for the remote that had been abandoned on the couch.

"CNN, turn on CNN right now," she ordered, and I hung up the phone.

"What channel is CNN?" I asked, already flipping the channels.

"267!"

And there he was.

I was face-to-screen with the television as this two second-long loop of surveillance tape from outside the station ran over and over.

It was grainy, but it was him.

He walked three steps, swung the door open and disappeared inside.

Over and over and over and over. I kept hitting the 30-second delay backwards arrow thing on the remote.

His shoulders looked wider, but sloped. Sagging.

His hair was so long!

It was over his ears and shaggy. So long!

He was in a jacket I didn't recognize with the hood pulled down, no knowing what color it was on the black-and-white film.

On the sixth or seventh play of the tape, I noticed.

His shoes were the same.

I'd written my name on the soles of his shoes, and he was wearing those exact same shoes!

"Those are his shoes!" I yelped, then clapped my hands over my face. "Mom! His shoes!"

I turned and Renee was wiping her own tears away, but there was something pensive there. But she just smiled at me anyway before picking up the phone.

I sat and stared at the television, unable to pay attention to anything else.

"Bella? Bella. Shelley said not to come up there. It's pure chaos, and we don't want to be in the way. We don't want to bungle anything they might be-"

"Did she see him?" I asked.

"Yes. It's him," my mom said with a disbelieving smile, before her face entirely crumpled. "Thank God. It's him."

"Screw Shelley! We're going," I said, heading for the door.

"We don't want to mess anything up, Bella! You know dad always said these first moments are crucial. We don't want to be a distraction."

"Screw all that, Mom! He's home! That's all that matters!"

See, I wasn't thinking of all the things my mom was.

That there would be fallout from this.

That maybe he had run away, and if he had...would anyone ever forgive him?

Or maybe he hadn't run away. Maybe something horrible had happened and if it had...would he even be the same boy?

And maybe, just maybe, having him back would be more heartbreaking than having him disappear.

I called the one person other than Edward that I absolutely had to speak to.

"Bella."

"Emmett."

"Bella, you can't even get near the place, it's insane-"

"Were you up there?"

"Yeah, yeah, me and Jasper went up there. I called you but you didn't answer and Bella, it's chaos. You can't even get close to the station, there are fucking cameras and people everywhere. They got the PA police over there, keeping everyone back- it's a madhouse."

"He's home."

"He's home," Emmett repeated. "It's so damned surreal."

"Right?" I breathed. "I've had this dream a thousand times." I gave a shaky laugh, hanging my head until my hair was a protective curtain around me and my phone.

"Seriously," Emmett echoed, then we stayed on the phone in silence for a minute or so, both of us deep in thought but sharing similar thoughts.

Then we both burst into laughter, the relieved, adrenaline-induced kind that you just jitter with, the kind that if you don't move, you'll choke on your hysterics or throw up.

"Do you want me to-"

"Yeah, yeah, I'll be outside," I said.

It just felt like...we should be together. All of us.

I paced the living room floor, my bag flopping against my thigh while waiting for Emmett, my mom still glued to the TV, but they were giving no new information, just saying the same crap over and over, the same stuff that had been replaying in my head for twenty minutes now.

"Sorry to interrupt, Anne, but we're going to cut to a live feed of Forks Chief of Police Charles Swan, giving a press conference."

My mother sat up straight, full of pride and excitement as she fumbled to press record on the DVR.

My dad was suddenly on the screen behind a small podium, his formal cap in place, his uniform in crisp condition. Seeing him on the national news just capped off the what I already knew would be one of the most memorable days of my life.

"This afternoon at approximately 5:15pm, missing person Edward Cullen came to the Forks Police Station under his own recognizance," Charlie said, then took a deep breath. "We have a person of interest detained in relation to the disappearance. No further comment on that for now. We won't answer any questions in an effort to protect the investigation-"

A bunch of questions were thrown at him anyway and Charlie looked kind of shell-shocked, leaning away from the mic.

"I knew it!" I crowed. "I knew-"

"Shh, shh!" Mom hissed again, wildly waving the remote at me.

"Chief Swan, can you tell us if he's injured physically at the moment?" a voice shouted.

"Mr. Cullen is currently under police protection and being looked over by staff at Forks General as a precaution but… he looked okay to me," Charlie said, and for the first time, he grinned at the crowd.

"Has he been reunited with his family?"

"Both of his parents don't plan on leaving his side for a long time," Charlie confirmed, and the whole thing kind of turned into a giddy, celebratory situation, like, the news actually had something wonderful to say, and people become high with humor and light-heartedness. Charlie's head bowed and a small chuckle was heard in the mic before he raised it once again. Maybe if he wasn't my dad I wouldn't have noticed, but there were tears in his eyes and emotion I'm not sure I'd ever seen before on his face.

"We're real happy to have him home. Real happy," Charlie said in a final comment before turning and being ushered away by a couple of cops with Port Angeles PD uniforms on.

It cut back to the news anchor who had info to spit out rather quickly, and suddenly, it was all moving fast again.

"...Chief Swan reporting that they have a suspect in custody. We're getting reports, nothing confirmed yet, that suspect is a La Push resident named Aro Vouch. I'm being joined by Kate Cavanaugh now, who's been covering the story in our LA station."

"Hi Dan, thanks. That's right, we're hearing that it's possible that Edward Cullen was being held in La Push, which is actually a neighboring town of Forks, this entire time. Suspect is Aro Vouch, a sixty-two-year-old long-time resident of La Push with an extensive record of assault and drug-related charges."

"To get a clear picture, Kate, how close is La Push to Forks?"

A map went up on the screen and I tuned out, knowing exactly how far La Push was to Forks.

He'd been there?

The entire time?

He'd been so close, this whole entire time? I could've ridden a fucking bike to him?

There was a tap at the door and Emmett walked in, Jasper, Jess and Rose quietly trailing after. No one said a word. They lined up behind the couch and together, we all stared at the TV.

He'd been so very, very close the entire time.

And it was just too much of a shock to even go there yet. To even think that any one of us, or my dad, or his parents could've just... wandered over and picked him up.

There'd be guilt. That would have to come later.

"I know that fucking house! I know that house!" Emmett yelled, pointing at the TV when they showed an old, yellowing house with sagging vinyl in the middle of the woods, yellow caution tape closing off the perimeter.

My mom didn't even flinch at his language.

"You know who lives there?" Jess asked.

"No. But the house! When we were kids, we'd goof off in the woods. I've been by that place so many times. So many times," Emmett said, his voice going from loud and declarative to soft and quiet all in one sentence.

"We'll be sure to update as information becomes available. Back to the situation in Bosnia..."

But what about the situation in Forks? I wondered as my mom quickly flipped to local news, where it was more of what we already knew.

Again, they played the loop of Edward over and over.

"Look at homeboy's hair," Jasper crowed, shaking his head. "Shit is crazy. This is so crazy."

And like that, we were all laughing again.

Mom ended up in the kitchen, baking cookies. Then a pie. Then a cake. We all sat around the kitchen, nervous and celebratory binge-eating, cramming anything and everything we could shovel into ours and each others' mouths.

The pizza never did arrive.

Turns out Main street had been blocked off because of media trying to bust through to the crime scene.

That house.

Charlie didn't come home that night but we stayed up until dawn, everyone gathered at my house, listening to Rosalie and Jessica plan the party of the century.

Maybe it was foolish to not stop and think of the fallout, to just let happy and relieved emotion reign, making us silly and giddy, like he was right there with us. Maybe it was foolish. But God. We deserved it, that giddiness.

I crawled into bed that night with my phone in my hand, my heart fluttering again when something occurred to me.

I could call him... and the possibility that he'd answer was there.

For the first time in two years that possibility was there, and once it took root in my mind, it expanded, taking over my thoughts until they boiled down to one fervid certainty.

I should call him.

I panted hard and tapped open my contacts, his name right there- EDWARD in all caps. He'd changed it from the normal font because he had said he liked the idea of my phone giving a shout whenever he needed to talk to me.

I bit my lips, holding in some kind of noise that was threatening to explode.

I knew that though she kept it a secret from Carlisle, Esme paid that phone bill every month and that Charlie had given that phone back to Esme as a favor because he'd lost faith it'd ever be of any use in solving that case.

I hit the green call button and worried the corner of my lip.

It rang six times, but I didn't hang up. Truthfully, I had called before. Just to hear his outgoing voicemail.

"Hang tough. I'll call ya back," is what it said, my giggle in the background, a message recorded a lifetime ago.

It rang a seventh time.

It rang half of an eighth time.

"Is it you?"

His voice was his voice! But so different. Kind of... kind of like Edward's voice without that thing that made him Edward. But still. Still.

"Oh God," I breathed, then froze. It was all I could get out. I was overwhelmed by my frenetic pulse and hot and cold; how three words in a long-ago voice could flip my world right side up was astounding.

And then silence.

So much silence. In my mind I'd recorded every second of the past two years, all the things I wanted to tell him. None of it would come forth or even seemed to matter, not really. Suddenly, everything that had happened in the past almost-two years kind of faded into the periphery of my existence, like a long-forgotten memory or maybe amnesia, things I could almost grasp but was slipping through my fingers. I'd been waiting for this moment, and now there was nothing I could even say, despite the questions firing in my brain, encroaching on the tip of my tongue.

"You don't have to say anything," I finally said.

"Okay."

His voice in my ear sent tears down my face and he remained silent, but in my heart, I said a prayer, thanking God for this exact moment.

I had learned to stop. To listen to his breath. To be here, right now, in this moment and be grateful for it.

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