Disclaimer: Everything in the Twiverse belongs to Stephenie Meyer. I am just borrowing them for my own amusement (and hopefully yours too). No copyright infringement intended.

A few notes:

In Chapter two, the line from New Moon wasn't underlined for some reason. It was, "Bella, the last real birthday any of us had was Emmett in 1935. Cut us a little slack, and don't be too difficult tonight. They're all very excited."Just wanted to make sure that was properly credited to Ms. Meyer.

I hadn't planned on posting again until Friday, but a reviewer asked me if Chapter Two was the end of the story, and I wanted to put that fear to rest. Besides I was awake reading this fabulous, addictive fanfic entitled "Bella Hale" byJulesSC and after inhaling the first twenty-one chapters in the past three hours – it's 2:30 in the morning now – I figured that if I forced myself to stop reading so I could post the new segment of Serenity's Prayer, I might get in bed before dawn!

Here it is … Hope you enjoy it! And thanks again for all the reviews – keep 'em coming!

Chapter 3: Vampires Don't Cry

Edward's POV

I remained in the forest, my eyes focused yet unseeing, wondering what had just happened. My stone body felt weary, and I had to lean carefully against a nearby oak to keep from falling straight to the ground, feeling as if the very life had been snatched from my chest.

I lifted my eyes to the Swan's front door in the vain hope that my precious Love would be standing there, or at the very least, crack the door enough to show me that all was not lost and that I hadn't seen the last of her in this life, save in my perfect memory. But the door remained resolutely shut, and although I hadn't been paying strict attention, I was almost sure she'd locked it behind her.

I groaned audibly as the rumbling in my chest threatened to take me completely over. I felt myself sinking to the forest floor, the damp earth beneath me a fitting bed in which to lie alone with my misery. I glanced at my surroundings, and the first of what would surely be millions of images flitted through my mind. "It's too green," she'd once said of Forks in her sleep, and from my ant's eye view, I had to agree with her.

Agree with her. Had I only been able to do that eleven minutes earlier.

I slowly raised myself to a sitting position, hoping that would help me think better or perhaps not think at all. It seemed for all my plans and rationalizing, I had still made all the wrong decisions. And I would pay for them for the remainder of my wretched existence.

An existence I would have to survive without Bella.

Impossible.

I rubbed my temples and took deep breaths as I'd watched so many humans do when nervous or afraid. As I didn't need the oxygen, the healing effects were lost on me. Still, I felt somewhat calmer after the seventy-first one, better prepared to retrace my mental steps and figure out where I'd gone so wrong in my seemingly flawless thinking.

My sole intention since the night of Bella's birthday party had been to extract myself and my dangerous life from hers. As I drove her home, I fleetingly thought that I could remove myself from her life over time, giving both of us the chance to warm to the idea of a separation. But as soon as we were in the sanctity of her room, with her enticing scent and potent memories assaulting me in every corner, I knew that would be a hopeless endeavor.

So when I returned home that night, I realized that I had no choice but to leave Forks, never again to return. Although the very notion ripped at my core, I knew it was the best and only choice I could make for Bella, the choice that loving her more than life itself forced me to make. I knew that whether or not my family came with me would be irrelevant. All that mattered was my exodus from Bella's life.

With grim resolve, I focused only on the preservation of her well-being, believing that no matter what she did or said, by the end of this afternoon, I would be out of her life for good. For as unimaginable as the agony of leaving her might be, I knew it would pale in comparison to what would be if she perished because of me. That, I believed, would be the greatest pain of all.

I was wrong about that.

This pain… the pain of Bella walking, no, running away from me… this made the three days of my transformation seem like a caress from the sun on a warm summer day. This made the torture of our separation while I unsuccessfully played keep-away with Victoria and James seem like a stroll through our meadow. This made the catastrophe of the other night almost desirable. At least then, she had wanted to be with me.

But no more.

I closed my eyes, hoping that blocking my vision would make the thought easier to bear, but her exquisite beauty tortured me behind my lids, and I vowed never to close them again.

Bella left me. My angel mounted up on her pretty wings and flew away from me as fast as her fury would take her, back to the safety of her life without me. The very place to which I had sought to banish her. I had come here to leave her, to commit emotional suicide and make my permanent exit from her life, and instead, she had left me. Bella told me goodbye, and then she left me without so much as a backward glance.

In some small recess of my overactive mind, I realized that I should have been pleased with this outcome, grateful even. Without my dangerous presence in her life, Bella would be safe, or as safe as my charmingly awkward girl could ever be. The end had been achieved, our separation was a fact, and those were the truths that mattered.

But the part of my soul where my scattered feelings resided could feel no joy because it was too distracted by the details of her departure. However strong my belief that Bella was better off without me, I could not escape the reason she left me.

Bella left me not because I was a soulless savage who thirsted for her blood. Not because two nights ago, my entire family, with the exception of my father, had barely suppressed the desire to kill her. Not even because I had exposed her to a relentless tracker who had tricked, assaulted, and bitten her with his venomous teeth.

No.

Bella left me because she thinks I don't respect her.

Ironic.

Bella left me because of a character flaw from my former life. Bella left me, I thought with a bitter laugh, because of the young man I still am inside this monstrous shell. I had always wished that I could be human for her, thinking such a metamorphosis would solve our problems. Now the lone remnant of my waning humanity has taken her away from me forever.

Shakespeare couldn't have scripted it better.

The wind shifted directions, reminding me of the hour, and I figured that I should prepare to depart. Pulling myself up from the ground with a cursory swipe at the dirt on my slightly wet clothes, my thoughts turned homeward.

But my legs followed my heart down the narrow path that led to Bella's front door and my salvation. Although the door had not budged since she closed it forty-three minutes ago, I hoped against all hope that maybe she had left my evening entrance open. Noting that Charlie's cruiser wouldn't arrive for another twelve minutes, I walked around to the side of the house to my love's bedroom window. All I needed was a crack, the slightest distance between the window and the ledge, and I would fly up there on Eros' wings and beg her to forgive me.

But no such heroics would be necessary. For not only was the window shut, but the curtains were completely drawn. The only sign of life was the gentle thrumming of her heartbeat, erratic but strong even at this distance.

The message was clear.

And as much as it pained me to turn away from that beautiful sound, I knew I had to. Even if she never knew, I would respect her wishes this once, to show God or whoever might be watching the depths of my esteem for her. That I loved, needed, and desired her with every fiber of my frozen being. And for that reason and that one alone, I kissed my hand, laid it against the wall beneath Bella's window with a silent wish for her eternal health and happiness, and departed from her house for the last time.

—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—o—

Despite the sluggishness of my steps, I reached my house in the forest before I was ready. I stood a good distance from it, nearly where Bella used to park her truck when she visited. My eyes noticed faint traces of her tire tracks in the muddy ground, and I captured the sight to recall on a day when the thought of my love didn't produce a different sort of my fire in my lungs.

The trees were silent above me. Woodland creatures instinctively knew better than to make their homes near ours, but even the leaves seemed to be in mourning. I could hear the running of the river to the west, the faint sound of a truck passing on the highway, but other than that, there were no other sounds of significance.

And for a mind-reading vampire, that almost never happened.

I knew my family was home and that they knew I was here as well. I couldn't hear anything that suggested they were packing up the house, but maybe Alice hadn't told them….

Alice.

I tried to quell the flicker of anger that accompanied my thoughts of her, but I couldn't do so quickly enough. I knew she felt guilty about not seeing the disaster that Bella's party would become, knew she couldn't have seen it because there was no way to anticipate a paper cut.

But that didn't mollify my irritation that her insistence on throwing the party had set the stage for the disaster. To say nothing of her mate's role in all of this. Jasper didn't need his special senses to feel the churning ball of emotions he inspired in me right now. I certainly didn't blame him more than I blamed myself, but it was tough not to see him and want to kill him.

As killing him would be easier than suicide.

Try as I might, I couldn't stay mad at Alice for long, and I needed to tell my favorite sister firmly and sincerely that I was no longer angry or blaming her for the holes in her visions.

Her visions.

Alice could see decisions once they were made.

I stopped in my labored tracks. That meant that Alice saw what happened today in the forest. She had seen it the moment Bella's eyes…those alluring, passionate eyes…had first hardened toward me. She had seen the formation of Bella's belief that I don't respect her and seen that belief contort into the reason she would leave me.

And if she saw that, then she also saw that Bella thinks my family doesn't respect her.

And there was no way she would keep that revelation to herself.

I listened more closely as I dragged myself toward the house and realized with a start why it was so quiet. Their thoughts were coming so quickly and intensely that they all blended into a somber white noise, thoughts so similar in tone and color that I found it tough to distinguish among them. Rosalie's thoughts stood out because of their standard, selfish tenor. But Emmett, despite his disappointment regarding recent events, was seemingly incapable of harboring negative feelings for very long.

But my parents and my two newest siblings were saturated with grief and self-loathing, and as their thoughts harmonized painfully with my own, I realized the true price we would all have to pay. A price including the hefty penalty of shipping my family to another part of the world and handling the fracture that Bella's loss would cause. How I would ask that of them was beyond me to comprehend right now.

Walking around to the side of the house where my bedroom window faced, I planted myself briefly in the earth before springing up to its ledge. It was impossible for me to pass through that living room without seeing Bella splayed in a pile of broken glass and pink frosting as a result of me pushing her; unbearable to smell the florals of her blood—barely obscured by the bleach Esme so liberally used to cover it—and the potency of her fear still thick and suffocating in the air. I didn't blame my family for continuing their use of the area of the house, but I would never step foot in that room again as long as we remained here. In truth, the only place I felt relatively safe was in my room.

"Relatively" being the operative word.

My room was littered with images of Bella from our sweet summer together: Bella standing at my music wall, choosing a CD at random, and daring me to guess which track she was playing with only three notes as clues, her eyes alight when she thought she'd stumped me. Bella tummy-side down on the floor, engrossed in my copy of iWuthering Heights/i, her feet crossed in the air at the ankles, swaying idly to some rhythm in her head. Bella lying on top of me on the couch, her hair falling to one side of her face as my nose skims her jawline, pausing before I taste her warm, rosy lips….

Why would I think I could be safe here?

That's when it hit me. And it hit me so hard that I dropped to the floor in a smooth heap.

The world was no longer safe for me because Bella would not be in it.

It wouldn't matter where we moved next: Ithaca, Ireland, Istanbul. Wherever I was would be a foreign, alien place full of meaningless faces and hollow encounters because Bella would not be there. And she would never be there.

Not because I was a vampire. Not because I belonged to a family of vampires. Not because she'd been bitten by a vampire. But because I was the kind of man who wanted to protect her and refused to let her make choices that could kill her. And in her book, that attitude spelled disrespect.

"A deal-breaker," she'd called it.

I ran my hands through my hair and gripped with such force that a few strands fell into my lap. A potent swirl of anger, heartache, and futility swelled to a stormy pitch, and I knew I was going under.

So lost was I in my sea of sadness that I didn't hear her come in until she'd closed the door behind her. She had never done anything like this before, and it was a testament to my anguish that I permitted her to do so. My emotions had always been private, my varying hells of a solitary nature. But today, this time, she would not allow it.

She gingerly approached me, her thoughts kind and benevolently brief.

Edward, let it out.

I was already rocking by the time she joined me on the floor. And as Esme wrapped herself completely around me, holding me in her strong maternal grip, I gave myself over to the mounting torment and let the first of the tearless sobs rip me apart.