We're baa-aaack!

Did you miss us? We missed you guys and our crazy deer-and-paint-lovin' twosome. Sorry we did not get to reply to every review from the last chapter, but we had a nice week off. We will try to catch up this week if we missed yours. We're so in love with every word you send us.

xoxo HB/PB

Chapter 23

~Bella~

Between the crickets, between Edward humming his way toward his house, and between the mindless tick of seconds, the image of my house came into view.

Between my heartbeats and the birdsong and the swish of the wind, it rose up from the paper, slow as a ghost from a grave. The eaves. The porch. The silhouette against the sky. The light fading fast behind it. The streak of something white that looked as though it was dashing across the porch, too fast to be caught.

I ran.

Threw the photo down and bolted.

My feet didn't know how to do anything but run. My heart didn't do anything but flee.

The house… that photo. I had never seen it so outside the walls before, so removed, and it did something terrible to me. Cut me deep and mean down the center because that was my life there, my entire world distilled, and if it looked that sad on paper, did I look the same? The way it sat there on the horizon like it was angry to simply exist, slumped and tired. The evening sky left it in shadows, dark and gloomy, except for the streak of light racing across the porch.

A white flash that sliced the house in half and looked so out of place—it could only be made by something not quite touching the land of the living.

Her soul. Or her ghost.

A spark from the other side.

I ran. Dropped the photo on the countertop and ran as though I could fly, my heart thundering hummingbird-time, throat clenched hard around something that felt like a forest fire. I skidded to a stop on the porch, all fury and fear, huffing at the screen door with my blood pounding hot, my stomach gone cold. I felt like shedding my skin, like holding my breath until I drowned, like screaming at her because I knew she could hear me.

Instead, I kicked the door.

Yelled out loud and put my foot through the mesh. It caved easily, torn down the middle around my ankle, and I kicked it again for good measure, the frame groaning in protest. I was going to tear that door right off the house. Rip the wallpaper from the plaster and pull all the ivy off the porch. I was going to take a hammer to the mirrors. Put my feet and my fists and my aching rage through the floors and the windows. Bring that whole behemoth down around me.

First, I was going to destroy that fucking carpet.

I stormed the kitchen and pulled the butcher knife out of the block with a cool swish of steel, rounding on the hallway as though I was going to battle—nerves and terror and wild determination. My knees scraped harshly against wood and fiber as I collapsed into the hallway, the knife shaking and my breath coming fast. I gripped an edge and sawed through the carpet, the fibers so old they flaked away around the blade in a fine dust of polyester.

I was crying by the time I got a few inches in. Hiccuping tears as I neared the other edge. Full on sobbing by the time I started hacking into the carpet on the other side of that spot.

It took twelve awful minutes to tear it free.

I flung the chunk of carpet out the door, narrowly missing the fawn in the process. She darted away, missed by inches, and stopped at the edge of the yard. When she looked back at me, ears trembling, there was fear on her face. I sobbed again, wiped my eyes, and held my arms out to her, feeling guilty. But she ran. Just like I did. Back out over the grass toward Edward's house because at this moment, he was the safer, softer, nicer one of the two of us. Edward the shattered. Edward the bitter and brilliant and brave and broken. Edward the shining light of salvation.

She took one last look at me and bolted in his direction.

I stood, the knife clattering to the floorboards, soggy vision and wobbly heart. The house felt so empty, hollow, yet full to bursting with her and me and the moment of dreadful confrontation that ended it all, right where I was standing now. I grabbed hold of a peeling corner of that ugly wallpaper and pulled. It ripped off jagged and arched like a big swipe of paint, the drab grey plaster beneath it. I grabbed another corner and another, my heart beating harder with every angry swipe of curled up wallpaper discarded on that now-bare hallway floor.

Anguish felt like the sharpened edge of a knife. Like the moment before you know you're going to die. Like seeing your reflection in the shiny sheen of a bullet, the warp in your face as it spun slow motion for your forehead and you ducked, but not before you felt it graze your cheek.

Anguish felt like your mother on the other end of that gun.

I stood panting in that exact spot, the imprint of my fearful footprints burned there, just as surely as she had stained the carpet. The vision of her was so strong, I wasn't entirely convinced I was hallucinating. The wild flyaway of her hair and her dress as dirty as if she'd gone out and rolled around in the dirt. The feral, desperate look in her eyes. The way her face twisted and her mouth opened, but she hadn't said a word before the blast deafened both of us

Turning slow on my heels, I scanned the room, mentally plotting trajectories, until my eyes found the tiny bullet hole in the wall, just at the edge of the bookcase. Forgotten by me and unnoticed by everyone else until now.

There was a pair of scissors in an old sewing basket, forgotten for decades. I dug until I found them, the metal cool as I gripped the blades. They probably belonged to my grandmother, maybe the grandmothers before her, and I wondered how many of them fell off the same cliff my mom had. How many had fallen face first into the earth and stumbled to their feet, broken and twisted in every way—tragedy bringing out the worst in them. A long line of them, I had been told. From death to divorce to lightning strikes, the women who forged the path across time to end with me were prone to the ravages of life and heartbreak, their minds often falling victim long before their bodies.

Maybe I was doomed to follow.

I stood on the arm of the couch and gouged the scissors into the wall, white plaster snowfall all over my feet, and I coughed around it hovering in the air. The drywall came away easy, a crumble after only a slight provocation as though the house was eager to let this thing go. A sore tooth, this last trace of evidence, now that the carpet was up. I flung the scissors, clattering to the floor as I dug my fingers the rest of the way and pulled the bullet free. I dusted it off on my shirt and peered at it, a mangled, misshapen image of me peering back.

Something upstairs crashed to the floor, splintering the silence.

I almost fell off the arm of the couch, flattening against the wall to keep upright. "Mom?" I yelled, voice echoing against a silence like a million voices screaming at me, all at once.

"Mom!" I clambered off the couch, the bullet tucked into my pocket, and I took the steps two at a time, falling into her room like a cyclone. I raced to the window and flung it open, the sash groaning in protest, fresh air flooding the room. When I turned, I half expected the contents to turn to ash, the way ancient mummies do when they've touched air for the first time in too long.

Nothing happened.

"I can't live like this," I told her. "You have to go. Just go! Go!" I waved my hands wildly in front of the window, hoping to push her ghost out into the wilderness. Ushering her out, picking up a dress and tossing it right out into the sky. It landed soft and bouncy in the grass far below me. I threw her stack of books into the grass behind it. Threw her pillow and her lamp and her set of hairbrushes out too. Grabbed an armful of clothing and hauled it out the window as well. I threw out her blanket and even knocked over her bedside table purely for the vengeance of it. I'd nearly emptied the room before I came across it.

The doll.

That goddamned doll, eyes hollow and head empty, with a heart made out of cotton. It smiled dumbly back up at me, and I flooded all of my rage and my hurt and my resentment down my arm right into its stupid soft body. Poisoned it with my hatred. "Fuck you," I hissed at it before I flung it out the window, good riddance.

I stood in front of the window, waiting to feel it—the release, the shift of weight, the temperance of all the guilt, but nothing happened. I felt heavier than ever.

"Bella."

I spun, unsteady hands on the vanity chair to keep upright. Edward. In the doorway, his hands hanging helpless in the air, face grey around the edges. His mouth hung open, and I could only imagine it, this scene he was stumbling across. A messy girl in the middle of her messy life, having a fit over her mother's non-ghost and talking to dolls.

"What are you doing? The carpet and— " He glanced around at the mess I'd made, and at me, slumped like a broken bird in the middle of a minefield.

"I hate this place." My words came out rotten, and I picked up the flimsy little chair right off the floor. Turned in one fell swoop and took out the pretty mirror. From one to one hundred million in a shattered heartbeat of wood to glass.

The glass exploded, showering me in rainfall of shrapnel.

"Whoa!" Edward shouted at me and put his hands out further, holding his palms toward me as though he was approaching a rabid dog. "Just hold on a second." His eyes dropped to my feet, the dust-fine sprinkle of glass and wood shattered all around me, and he edged a careful foot closer across the carpet.

"Don't touch me!" I snapped, harshly enough to make him jump. He stilled instantly, his eye hard on mine, and his jaw set in a vise grip.

"Fine. But don't you dare take a single fucking step." He looked at my feet again and glared even harder. Here he was, worried about my feet when it was my heart and my head and my screaming conscience that he should be warning me against. "What is this, Bella? What are you doing?"

"She's here," I hissed. "I can feel her; I saw her. In the photo." The last bit of it came out as a sob, a tiny crack wrenching open at the base of my enormous dam. The giant barrier holding back the messy, bloody bits of me, patched together with white grade school glue and scotch tape.

"Who is here?" Edward asked, wary and guarded.

"My mother," I said faintly, sure that she was listening. "The house, that photo… didn't you see it?"

Recognition flashed across Edward's face. "The light, the swipe of it down the middle?" He shook his head at me. "That could be anything. Weird sun reflections, dust, or moisture on the lens. It doesn't mean you… caught her."

We both knew he didn't exactly believe himself. I glared at him.

"I want to burn it down."

"Burn what down, exactly?" He'd somehow moved closer without even sparking my attention, creeping stealthily across the carpet as though he was practiced at this sort of thing. Approaching the enemy. Going unnoticed.

"The house. This house. All of this," I stammered, throwing my arms around myself, knowing full well that I looked like a crazy person, that I might well be following those familial footsteps into madness. That he probably thought I was completely bonkers and was going to run as far away from me as he could get.

Good.

"You can't burn down your—"

"You can't fix me," I hissed.

"I've got no intentions of fixing you." He jabbed a finger at me, face stern. "I'm in no place to fix anyone but myself."

The sadness in his voice, the way it caught behind his teeth before he spoke, the way his face turned brittle around the edges… something about him broke me. The boiling pit of rage and remorse that had been threatening to explode for weeks now, finally boiling over. I picked up a vase full of dead daisies, death rattles of crispy petals as I smashed it to the floor at my feet, right there between us like a grenade, filling the room with something that tasted of rot and perfume.

"That's it," he snapped. He swooped forward and plucked me up out of my mess, the glass and bone and dead flowers, ghosts and all. He swung us out of the room and down the stairs, his fingers throbbing hard and hot against me, breathing roughly. Down the stairs and out into the fading sunshine. Far into the field between our houses, he set me on my feet and held me tight by the arms as if he was sure I was going to bolt again. I was breathing so hard the horizon was starting to spin, spots of light hovering all around us, my lungs burning hellfire and molten brimstone. There was so much air out here, out of that house, but I felt like I was suffocating in the sunshine.

I was drowning.

"Take a breath," he ordered, gripping my face hard in both hands. I gaped at him, lungs frozen. "Breathe, dammit." I did as he said, the air coming shaky, stumbling in and out of my lungs. "Do it again." Another breath, pulling easier this time. "Another." I felt air hit my lungs for the first time in what felt like hours, a cool soothe over the burn in my chest. I slumped against him, his arms coming around my shoulders as I held tight to fistfuls of his shirt.

It was quiet for a long time, save the crickets and the frogs and the swooping bats through the twilight, before he took my hand and led me toward his house. Porch light glowing and the fawn waiting on the top step and my house fading into the dark behind my back.

Mad love to LayAtHomeMom, Hadley Hemingway, and CarrieZM for making us pretty.

Enjoy, and leave us your thoughts!

HB&PB