Recap: Bella, called into Principal Banner's office and accused of an inappropriate relationship with a student, discovers that the proof is texts to that student from her phone. Bella deflects the accusation by asking for her union rep, Ron Jefferson, to be present. Alice tells her that her accuser is not Jacob Black, but Justin Stanley, abetted by Coach Clapp. Alice arranges for the Cullen publishing house to summon Jefferson, an aspiring author, to New York. At cross country practice, Bella falls and injures her back. Edward gives her a cello lesson. The La Push Wolves win the cross country meet, to Clapp's annoyance. Bella visits Edward's house to see Esme and Carlisle, just back from a long trip. Esme suggests that she has a way to resolve the Stanley-Clapp accusations, while Carlisle scents that something is very wrong with Bella.

So, as I've said before, I'm describing an experience that you or someone you love may have had, but remember that it will be different for everyone. Kudos to the readers who offered a spot-on diagnosis.

You'll recall that Truant Javelinas is the name of the band a.k.a. Guys Bella Swan Has Slept With.

Thanks to the marvelous Camilla10, and to Mr. Price.

Chapter 19: Mein Geheimnis

I got off the No. 2 bus and waited for Raquel on the front steps of her commune/apartment building, staring blankly at the healthy, carefree people walking past on 19th Avenue, the sounds of the street muffled by the low roar in my brain. It was a sunny afternoon, warm for Seattle, and the sidewalk was lively, full of shoppers lugging bags from the food co-op. At some point, Angela's boyfriend, Ben, appeared, and said hello. At another, Seth bounced up and sat next to me, all smooth brown muscled arms and legs that fidgeted impatiently and attracted ogling; Capitol Hill wasn't the straightest neighborhood in the city.

"Do you want to wait inside?" I asked him. "I have the key to her apartment."

"So do I," he said cheerfully. "But I want to see her as soon as I can. What brings you here? Wasn't there school today?"

"Not for me," I said. "Wasn't there school for you, though?"

"We're ahead of you – it's finals time at La Push. I'm almost done."

So am I, I thought, and turned the conversation to Saturday's race to distract Seth from asking again why I was in Seattle.

"That look on Clapp's face as Cullen beat his quarterback, that was so priceless I'll never -" Seth broke off as Raquel strode around the corner, her backpack full of art supplies, coming home from her day in one of Seattle's elementary schools. He stood up immediately and tensed like a bloodhound scenting a fox.

I didn't know if Raquel saw Seth or me first, but she grabbed his hand, then mine, turning my wrist to read the plastic hospital bracelet there.

"Fuck me, really?" she spat out, and scowled at me. "For the record, I don't agree with you."

"I know," I said quietly.

"Well, then, come on up, and let's get drunk. What do you want?"

"The strongest thing you have."

-έπ-

After Carlisle's diagnosis the night before, Esme had virtually forced Edward from the house, and I went upstairs to Carlisle's office to have my blood drawn.

"If you already know what it is, why do you need to do a screen? Why do you even need a second opinion?" I asked. I turned my face away as he slid a needle into my arm. It barely hurt.

"The Fred Hutchinson center has better equipment than I have, and you can't just show up at Kirsten Akerlund's office tomorrow and say you're there because your doctor has a keen sense of smell," he reminded me gently. He put a square of gauze on the crook of my elbow. "Press here."

So Carlisle went back to his hospital to run the numbers and put together a file on me. In the morning I called into the district hotline for a substitute teacher and was bundled into the back of Esme's Mercedes, hidden by its darkly tinted windows. Carlisle gazed at his wife from the passenger seat, stroking her neck, her thigh, as she drove to Bainbridge Island; his picture could illustrate a dictionary entry for "uxorious." Edward held me with arms like steel bars, a little too tight, but I didn't say anything. I didn't say that the car ride was making me nauseated, either, and I managed not to puke until I dashed into the restroom of the Seattle ferry. God, how I hated throwing up in front of Edward, and this was twice.

Esme and Edward put the Mercedes in the parking garage as Carlisle and I went up to Dr. Akerlund's suite at Fred Hutch. We were too early for Carlisle to have even called for an appointment, but it didn't seem to matter; I sat in a chair in the half-full waiting room and watched as he worked the ol' vampire dazzle on the receptionist, and then on Dr. Akerlund herself, deploying subtle compliments about her skill and reputation as the best practitioner in her field in the Pacific Northwest.

"I know you'll take good care of Bella," he said as she led me to her consulting room. There was a subtle threat there too, but Dr. Akerlund seemed not to have perceived it yet.

She motioned me to a seat in front of her desk, and I looked at the gynecological models on display as she looked at my file.

"What happened to your hands?" she asked after a moment, indicating the bandages on my palms.

"I fell down running," I said. "My back's been bothering me ever since."

"Hmm." She looked down at my file again. "I see you have very high CA-125 levels, but that test is notoriously inaccurate in young women."

"I know."

"You do?" Dr. Akerlund raised her eyebrows, which were so blond that I could barely see them, a testament to her Scandinavian ancestry. She started clicking away on her laptop. "What prompted Dr. Cullen to run this screen? Your symptoms could point to any number of things, most of them innocuous."

"My family history, I guess." I shifted in my chair to ease my back and vainly wished Edward were far enough away not to hear all this. "My mother got breast cancer when she was 24. She died at 29."

Dr. Akerlund yanked her head away from her computers to stare at me. "Any other relatives?"

All of them, I didn't say. "Um, my mom's mom had breast cancer. And my dad's mom had cervical …" I trailed off.

"Chances are that was caused by HPV," the doctor muttered, but her ruddy face was growing more somber. She looked at my file again. "You got a tubal ligation, so you don't want children. Why didn't you just have everything removed then, with your family history?"

I gaped at her. "It was hard enough to convince a doctor to do the tubal. Who was going to perform a hysterectomy, and a mastectomy and an, uh, an oophorectomy on an 18-year-old? Would you have?"

"Have you been tested for BRCA?"

"Yes. I don't have it."

Dr. Akerlund grimaced. "Then I probably wouldn't have. Let's go next door so I can examine you."

The pelvic exam was followed by various scans, and Dr. Akerlund's worried blue eyes were at odds with the resolutely optimistic expression on her face when she met with Carlisle and me several hours later. If she was wondering why an emergency room doctor from Forks was hanging around all day in Seattle with his patient, she didn't show it. I had no doubt that Akerlund was a stellar oncologist – that's why Carlisle chose her - but with the fascinating Dr. Cullen in the room, I was practically invisible. It meant I heard a lot more than I would have normally, I suspected.

"Your instincts were right on the mark," she told Carlisle. "Bilateral enlargement, with solid masses and neoplastic cysts. And take a look at this." She spread out images from the scans on the desk in front of us. "You see that tumor there, near the spinal column. That explains the back pain. Then here, you see the cells twisting around the large intestine, and here, the omentum. Nodal involvement, we have that, and then the lungs – there's some pleural effusion."

"So it's out of the abdominal cavity," I said.

Dr. Akerlund looked a little startled, as if she'd forgotten I was there sitting next to Carlisle. "Yes," she answered, then seized on the one ray of hope she saw. "But we don't have the results of the needle biopsy. Still, we should go ahead and schedule the surgery. We can remove the mass on the spine, and do the staging if –"

"What's the point?" I interrupted her, my voice hard. "If that's all malignant, which I bet it is" – I glanced at Carlisle – "then my chances suck. I know the survival rates. The numbers have barely changed in decades."

Dr. Akerlund frowned. "You are not a number. You are an individual."

I stood up. "Yes, I am. I am an individual whose every female ancestor has died young of cancer."

I walked out of Akerland's consulting room and into a pair of marble hands.

"Bella, don't go," their owner said softly, calmly. I looked up into Edward's golden eyes. "Listen to what the doctor has to say. We'll make sure that it's the best treatment. That there will be no pain. You're so healthy. You'll do everything right. You'll be a survivor. We'll all help you."

I could see Esme nodding in agreement over Edward's shoulder. From behind me, Carlisle added, "We will, Bella."

Edward was so close, and I pressed my face into his chest, between the lapels of his suit jacket. I breathed him in, and his arms wrapped around me. Yes, I could. I could be a fighter. I could venture onto the battlefield and vanquish my disease by trying hard enough. The way Renee hadn't.

Renee.

Renee who fought, and fought, and suffered and screamed and died. What the hell was I thinking? Why was I thinking it?

Fucking Edward Cullen. Fucking Edward Cullen and his scent and his beautiful face and his immortality and his imperviousness to pain and his superpersuasive superpowers.

"Don't," I spat, wrenching myself out of his hands. "Don't. You promised me. You promised me that you wouldn't try to persuade me to do anything. I don't want this, Edward. Let me go."

Constrained by the waiting room audience, he did. As my back shrieked, I pushed past an astonished Dr. Akerlund and ran downstairs to the street, into the sunlight where liars couldn't follow, and hailed the downtown bus before it pulled away.

-έπ-

"What kind?" Raquel said as we walked upstairs to her apartment.

"What are you talking about?" Seth asked.

"Ovarian," I answered her.

"I thought the tubal was supposed to help protect against that," she said.

"I'm the exception that doesn't prove the rule. Or something. Anyway, it wasn't enough."

"What are you talking about?" Seth repeated.

"What stage?" Raquel asked.

"Nothing official, but, you know, it's late for ovarian, because I have actual symptoms. It's not like breast cancer, when you feel a lump and it's Stage 1, and you have a pretty good chance of survival – "

"Shit, Bella, you have ovarian cancer?" Seth practically yelped. "But you're like, only, 24."

"Yep." I watched Raquel open her door and wave us in. Her apartment smelled like paint thinner and incense. Seth walked over to the window and threw it open.

"The bitch of it," I continued, "is that if it had been breast … I would have considered treatment now."

Raquel raised her eyebrows. "Because of your guy?"

"Because of my guy, yes." I sighed. "It's what I always wanted to avoid, you know, somebody tied to me, who would want me to go through everything on the off chance of a cure –"

My best friend slammed three shot glasses down on her coffee table. "And what about me?" she said bitterly. "I want you to live too." Seth, always hovering, pulled her into his arms and glared at me as she sniffled into his T-shirt.

I waited until she turned her head back to me to answer. "I know you do, but you have Seth," I said simply.

Her expression softened. "I do," she acknowledged.

The wolf in question looked puzzled. "I don't think I can get cancer," he said. "I mean, I can get hurt, but I get over it right away."

"That's not what she means, sweetie," Raquel said as I looked at Seth with envy and awe. He had much more useful genes that I did. "But I'm really glad to hear that. And if Edward Cullen had fallen in love with you, he'd be a lot better off."

"Ew," Seth said.

"Speaking of your guy, where is your guy?" Raquel asked me. "He didn't come with you to the doctor?"

I winced and waved vaguely at the window and the sun outside. "He did, but then I ran away from him, and he couldn't follow. He was trying to persuade me to get treatment."

Raquel shot me a sour look. "Can you blame him?"

"What are you talking about?" Seth asked for a third time.

"When I watched my mother die" – I winced at the memory – "I decided that I never wanted to go through anything like that. And then, as I found out more about my family history, I realized that it was pointless to go through it. We're not survivors, and my legacy to the world would be a bunch of toxic medical waste."

"Yeah, but, couldn't you be an exception?" Seth asked. "Hasn't there been all sorts of advances with cancer?"

"Not for ovarian," I said. "And not even for the kind of cancer my mom had, and Jacob Black's mom had - metastasized breast cancer."

Raquel finally opened the Dry Fly, and for the first time in my life I tasted whiskey. She grilled me about what Dr. Akerlund said, and I answered between burning sips that took the edge off the numbness I'd felt since Carlisle's diagnosis the night before.

"So for all we know, it's not malignant," Raquel said, seizing on the one hope left from Akerlund's assessment.

"Sure. Maybe it's something benign causing fluid in my lungs and giving me this fucking backache," I said bleakly, massaging my spine. "No, it's malignant. Carlisle smelled the cancer traveling in my blood. What he wanted Akerlund to do was to pinpoint the locations of the cancer cells."

Raquel looked at me in silence for a moment. "We need to eat something. Seth, would you mind getting takeout?"

He leapt up from the floor, eager as a puppy asked to fetch. "The macrobiotic place?" he asked.

"Perfect."

Thirty seconds after Seth shut the door behind him, Raquel asked the big question. "So, do you have an idea of how long you have?"

I haven't asked Alice yet, I didn't say. "That's not something Akerlund would have told me yet," I said instead. "But you know the answer already: when the pain gets unbearable, that's it."

"Fuck," Raquel said fervently, and tossed back a shot. "At least you have an out," she went on, baring her teeth and miming a vampire's bite.

"Do I?" I asked, and tossed back a shot myself.

As I picked at my dinner of seaweed and rice, I begged to talk about something else, something not involving disease or death, so we gossiped about friends and summer plans. Jacob Black was mellowing as he became more used to being in charge, Seth reported. The Truant Javelinas had a song on an indie movie soundtrack. Raquel was taking Seth home to Sells to meet her family, though she worried that her furry boyfriend would be uncomfortable in the June heat. I wondered how Charlie and my surrogate mother Yolanda would react to meeting my vampire lover, if said vampire lover could even show himself in Laconia.

As for that vampire lover, I wondered where he was now, where he was hiding in this month of late sunsets, whether I should be angrier at him for breaking his promise, or he should be angrier at me for ditching him. "I should call Edward," I said, pulling out my phone.

"Nah, you don't need to," Seth said. "He's outside."

"What?" I lurched over to the window to look, stupidly, since Edward obviously wouldn't be hanging out on the sidewalk sparkling.

Seth joined me and pointed. "In that big black monster S.U.V. across the street. You can't see in, but … well, I could smell him when I walked past."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"He asked me not to. He wanted you to have your space." Seth used finger quotes here, and I looked at him dubiously. He went on, "Yeah, Edward didn't say it like that, 'cause he's 100 years old or whatever, but that was the idea."

Shit. "I gotta go," I muttered, giving Seth an air kiss (because, smells), squeezing Raquel in a hug and silently apologizing to Raquel's invaded mind.

-έπ-

The passenger door of the big monster S.U.V. popped open slightly as I crossed the street. I peeked in warily, only to be yanked inside, deftly but swiftly, landing on a hard lap. Then Edward's arms were around my waist, his lips in my hair.

"I don't know whether to shout at you or kiss you," he muttered.

Angry or not, his voice sent shivers down my spine, and I really wanted to vote for the kissing.

"I want to do both," I said, scrambling off his lap, "but get us out of here first."

I snapped in, and he peeled away from the curb, not talking until we came to a stretch of empty sidewalks and warehouses near the Sound. The street was in shadow, the sun below the roof line, and I could hear seagulls scream when Edward opened the windows.

"You go first," he said, turning toward me as I unbuckled my seat belt.

"Where'd this mammoth vehicle come from?"

He looked a little startled, then waved dismissively. "I had it delivered to me at the hospital. It's nothing special. My only criterion was the tint."

I reached over to grab his hand when it stilled. "Okay, I'm sorry I ran from you like that, but I'm madder that you tried to beguile me into doing something I don't want to do. I know you remember you promised not to do that."

His eyes narrowed. "I remember you agreeing that I could do it when your life was in danger. Which it very much is."

I shook my head. "This is not a mountain lion attack. It's something we can discuss."

"How can we discuss it when you insist on keeping me in the dark?" Edward said, pulling his hand out of mine. He glared out the windshield. "I am an individual whose every female ancestor has died of cancer. Let's discuss that. Or how about, You know the answer already: When the pain gets unbearable, that's it? You've discussed it with Raquel, why not with me?"

I let out a shaky exhalation. "Because she was there when I figured it out."

He continued to stare out at the empty street, at the container cranes in the distance. "Tell me. I've heard Raquel's version now, but I want yours."

I tore my eyes away from his sharp jaw, the hands clenching on the steering wheel, and stared out into the street myself. "When I was in high school," I started, "I had to do this project where you did a family tree, and you listed dates of birth and death, and the cause of death. I knew that Renee's mom and Charlie's mom had died young, but I didn't know why. My grandfathers were gone too, but that was bad luck: they both died in car crashes.

"But Grandma Marie and Grandma Isabel … one breast cancer, one cervical, you heard that, both in their 20s. Charlie knew that at least. But nothing more. He didn't have any cousins or aunts or uncles on his mom's side to ask, and Renee didn't have any either. So I went to the vital records office in Yuma, to look at the death certificates. And it took a long time and a visit to Phoenix, but I got a family tree together. In fact, I made the best damn family tree in the class, because Charlie's family and Renee's family had been in the Southwest and in Mexico since they had been the property of Spain. Six generations just in Yuma. Pretty much all Latino, though some Anglos sneaked in there – that's why Charlie's a Swan and Renee was a Higginbotham. But the others -"

"Zapatero, Espinoza, Carabajal," Edward said, with his perfect recall.

"And so on, and so on, new names every generation because I concentrated on tracing back the women in Charlie and Renee's lines. Because they all had something in common. They all died in their 20s, after one kid."

"And all of cancer."

"Actually, no, but my guess is that they would have. In the older generations, there were a couple of pneumonia cases, a tuberculosis case, a case of childbed fever. They died in their late teens and early 20s. They were the lucky ones, really. But in the more recent generations, with those sorts of diseases disappearing, as my grandmothers got closer to 30, they all had cancer. Breast, uterine, ovarian … less often, stomach or liver cancer on the deaths certificates."

"How far back did you go?" Edward was looking at me again now, but his hands were still gripping the steering wheel."

"So here's the story." I took a deep breath. "In 1815 a girl named Isabel Salazar was born in Spain, in Balboa. A few years later, it appears, she immigrated with her father to Mexico, and ended up in Monterrey. She married a Monterrey boy, had twin daughters, an Isabel and a Maria, and died at 25. Those two daughters each had a daughter of her own; each died of cancer. Maria's daughter and Isabel Jr.'s daughter both moved to the Arizona Territory, but at different times and to different places.

"And Isabel Salazar's two branches never crossed paths again until Charlie Swan, son of Helen Isabel, descendent of Isabel Jr., met Renee Higginbotham, daughter of Marie, descendent of Maria, in the late 1980s." I smiled ruefully, thinking of my parents as young and in love, or at least in lust, so briefly. "They didn't know about their connection. And the irony is, that their moms had died young kind of brought them together, gave them something in common. What they didn't know that what they really had in common was a copy of a genetic flaw stretching back to 1815, or longer, as far as I know.

"And I didn't know until Christmas of my freshman year in Tucson. By then I had traced my ancestresses back across the border to Monterrey. Raquel flew down with me." I paused, thinking of the stale smell of the state archives office, and the more elegant surroundings of the cathedral records room, and finally the gloom of the Templo de la Preciosa Sangre. "And there we discovered that Isabel Salazar was my granny twice over."

"Pedigree collapse," Edward said unexpectedly. I made a noise of non-understanding, and he went on, "That's when ancestors overlap, because otherwise you'd have an unsustainable number of them."

"Huh. Like how everybody's line narrows back to Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all? Well, Isabel Salazar is maybe the Eve for a genetic mutation that means all her daughters will die of cancer in their 20s." I sighed. "I don't know what it means for Charlie, but it seems pretty obvious what it means for me."

"And that's also why you didn't want to have children."

"Yes, it's certainly one reason. Why would I pass this on?" I pointed a thumb at my chest. "It's enough that there's a researcher at University of Arizona with my non-BRCA yet cancer-prone cells to play with. I'm the last descendent of Isabel Salazar, and her line will end with me. That it persisted this long is a freak of statistics."

At that, I could hear grinding coming from the steering wheel. "Is it my turn now?" Edward asked, his voice hard. "Is that why you were so unafraid around me? You were going to die anyway, so you might as well be killed by a vampire? It makes me so " - uncharacteristically, he was searching for words – "so horrified. It's as if I'm your death wish."

"No!" I said. "Remember after the mountain lion tried to attack me? I was afraid to go run again in the woods – it was such a relief when you showed up the next day. There's just something about you, about us, that makes me feel secure with you."

"And you won't wear a helmet when you're on your bicycle."

"That's because I don't like them, and I know someone who got hurt in a crash precisely because she was wearing a helmet. You know yourself, a helmet couldn't have saved me when that food service van was driving into me – only you. And cars really do slow down more and pass me more carefully when I don't wear one." I inhaled. "I don't want to die. I've just had a while to get used to the idea."

"And you couldn't afford me the same courtesy? You couldn't give me time to get used to the idea?" He wasn't looking at me again.

"No," I said. "I didn't want to give you time to talk me out of my decision. Raquel has been trying to for years."

"Because it's an insane idea!" he shouted, the steering wheel deforming under his hands.

"Careful," I warned him, worried that the airbag was going to deploy, and his grip loosened.

"That's why you didn't want me to read her mind, so I wouldn't find this out," he said, his voice still furious.

"Partly," I admitted. "Mostly, though, I wanted to be able to look her in the face and know that I was trying to protect her privacy."

"What if the situation were reversed? What if it were I who suddenly announced that I was prone to a fatal illness and I wasn't going to do anything about it?" He paused long enough for the scenario to twist in my chest. "You seem so blithe about this, so –" he threw up his hands, to my relief – "fatalistic."

I laughed humorlessly, my anger resurfacing. "Oh, believe me, I'm not. And you're wrong: I didn't do nothing - I've done everything I could. I read the studies, followed all the advice. For most people, cancer is random bad luck, except for maybe for smokers and lung cancer, but even then there are non-smokers who seem to get it simply because a cell goes haywire. So I tried. I spent a fortune on organic food. I never ate the government surplus crap. I drank not too much, not too little, and only beer and wine – that whiskey tonight was my first hard liquor ever; I've never had tequila and I grew up in Arizona, for chrissakes.

"I never smoked anything. I ran diligently. I did yoga. I slept on a chemical-free futon. I got the HPV vaccine. I never got a tattoo, because who knows what the ink would do to me." I could see Edward flinch at the idea of my having a tattoo. "I didn't wear makeup or nail polish because of the chemicals, or dye my hair, or use perfume or shampoo. Maybe I could escape whatever trigger would start the cascade of cellular death in my body. And most of all, I made sure I wouldn't have children, because every woman in my family died after one birth.

"But it didn't matter," I said, staring at the steadily darkening sky. "My cursed great granny Isabel and her cursed genes. I could have had my breasts removed, and my uterus and my ovaries, and the mutation would have manifested itself in my liver or my brain. Nothing would prevent this from happening, because I am simply genetically flawed. It's not fatalistic, it's realistic."

Edward dropped his head to the steering wheel, and I reached over to touch his shoulder. "I'm sorry I ran, and you're right – if the situation was reversed, yes, I'd want to know. But as for treatment … I'm not sorry about my decision. I don't even have to agonize over it: the cancer started stealthily, and reproduced abundantly. What did Akerlund think?"

Edward was silent for a long moment. "Alice says she will recommend against treatment," he said finally.

Despite my years of expecting this day, his words sent a dagger into my stomach. "So my choice isn't really a choice – it's only thing I can do," I said hollowly.

Edward pulled me onto his lap again. "No, it's not," he whispered. "Please, Bella, consider the alternative."

He didn't say any more, just holding me until my back made itself unbearable. I grunted as I moved over to my own seat, and Edward muttered a profanity.

A second later, he handed me a small blue bottle. "Carlisle got these for you," he said. I looked at the label ruefully. Opioids and me, we were going to be BFFs, as long as forever lasted for me.

I didn't know how long that it would be, because I didn't ask the obvious followup question: How long did Alice say that I had?

-έπ-

The Oxy wiped me out, so I took another sick day, but I managed to get out of bed the following day. I arrived at school early, to give me time to meet with Bob Banner. His face hardened as I stepped into his office.

"Ron Jefferson is still in New York doing whatever with that publisher," he said waspishly. "You didn't need to avoid school because of that."

I was too emotionally drained to get annoyed at his presumption. "That's not why I was out," I said, and passed him the letter that Dr. Akerlund had emailed the previous day to Carlisle. "I have to go on medical leave, or whatever I should do to make it easiest for you to replace me."

Bob cringed as he read the paper, and I didn't give him time to say anything. "I'm well enough to do my classes today, to say goodbye," I told him. "But after that …"

"I'm - I'm shocked," he stammered, obviously feeling guilty about his unfortunate rebuke.

"I'm not," I said, and smiled slightly. "At least you've been able to start looking for my successor already."

I went next to Angela's classroom, wanting to tell her before she heard from someone else. She too was shocked, but I was the guilty one, wishing I'd timed my announcement better. I found myself comforting her as her students arrived, and had to hurry to my own homeroom.

Bob impressed me in one way: Roxanne Stevens, the guidance counselor, was already there, and so as I told my students that this was my last day, that I had an illness that meant I wouldn't return, I could let Roxanne deal with the brunt of the emotion and make promises that anyone could come and talk to her about this.

"You're a real pro at this," I said afterward. "Thank you for being here. It wouldn't have occurred for me to ask."

"It's my job," she answered. "And you're not the first teacher to go through this, I'm sorry to say. My advice: the calmer you are, the calmer they will be. Adolescents feed on one another's emotions."

True dat. The next period, one 11th grader burst into sobs, then another, and Roxanne ushered them from the room before the tears could spread further. By the next period, word had gone around the school, and my kids were less shocked and had more questions, which I dodged unless they were about the syllabus.

Alice manipulated Mr. Varner to get out of calculus class, and hung out with me in my prep period, and at lunch I was greeted with low murmurs and sideways glances from the students, and somber faces at the teachers' table. The chair where Clapp normally sat was empty. Coward.

A.P. English followed, and I was pleased to see Gracie Alvarez back in class, the Pacific Northwest Trust's lawyer having been effective in getting Mrs. Alvarez out of the Tacoma Detention Center.

Edward watched me intently, but said nothing. Alice was another story.

"Since the A.P. test is very soon, I had been planning one more prep session," I said after I announced my departure and the questions died down. "Ms. Cullen has volunteered to oversee it, and I strongly recommend that you attend. She's been meeting with an A.P. tutor on her own, and she has some very good insights into what kinds of questions will be on the test." As in, she knows exactly what questions were going to be on the test.

I dropped into my chair as Roxanne returned to her office, and Alice, with a great deal of chatter, arranged the time and place for the meeting – like the cross country club, this was a first for her, being in a study group with humans. I massaged my back and calculated how many hours until my next dose.

I looked up to find Edward at my desk, with all the other students still engaged with his sister. "Alice says go ahead and take the next pill," he said quietly. "You're going to need it in your next class." I started to protest, and he added, "Justin Stanley has convinced himself that you're faking illness because he accused you. He thinks he's chased you away." I snorted and he continued, "Carlisle will drive you home. Nobody will question that now."

Alice was right. The drugs numbed my response to Justin, who smirked at my announcement and asked, "Is it something I can catch?"

The girl he did wrong answered for me. "Too bad for you, Justin, intelligence isn't contagious," Lindsay Mallory said.

-έπ-

"No," I moaned the next morning, trying to pull the duvet up over my head.

"Come on, sleepy girl, you don't want to miss this," Edward insisted. In his voice was the first hint of good humor I'd heard for days, so I groaned and sat up. He wrapped a robe around me as if I were a small child, and led me to the front bedroom.

From its window I could look over my own front yard, of course, and at the McMansion of Sharon Stanley, my landlady, across the street. But instead of the rest of my usual view - an empty road - I saw a street that was oddly crowded, with a couple of official-looking dark sedans, and even more vehicles, a couple of them vans marked with television station call letters.

In a panic, I stumbled away from the window and into a solid chest. "The accusations came out? Why didn't you tell me? You need to get out of here!"

"No, no, don't worry," Edward said, turning me gently back toward the window. "They're not here for you. Look."

A few moments later, Sharon Stanley, clad in a pink velour tracksuit, stepped out of her front door, flanked by two solid-looking guys in bad suits. She was wearing handcuffs. A flash went off, video cameras recorded, voices called out questions muffled by my windowpanes.

"Why is Sharon doing a perp walk?" I asked.

"Because of him," Edward answered as Justin Stanley, looking freaked out, stood on the McMansion's little porch behind the main action. "Good job, Esme."

I gasped, realizing. "You mean, because of me?"

"No, because of him," Edward said. "If he hadn't borne false witness against his neighbor, this wouldn't be happening. Or at least not yet. Sharon Stanley's house of cards was always going to fall someday."

"House of cards?" I asked, watching one of the bad suits do that thing to protect Sharon's head as she slid into the back seat of a dark sedan.

"Haven't you ever wondered how Justin's aunt managed to become one of the biggest owners of downmarket residential housing in Forks?"

"Charlotte Gerandy sure has," I said, remembering a conversation at the church food pantry. "But I've been distracted by this guy with a much more impressive real estate portfolio – you know, with the gigantic Passivhaus in the forest, and the place in Seattle, and the place in San Francisco and the place in Chicago, and the place in Paris -"

Edward cut me off, but he didn't correct me. Hmm. "She did it through fraud," he said. "Somebody falls behind on her mortgage, maybe a subprime one with a ballooning interest rate, maybe someone who is elderly or ill or lost her job, and a legal notice is published of a mortgage in arrears. A polite young man calls or visits, promising to take care of it for her, to refinance her mortgage, if she surrenders her deed to her house for a while and makes some payments to him, something she can manage. It's such a relief.

"A few months later, she discovers that she's about to evicted because of her delinquent mortgage, never modified as promised, and she doesn't even have the deed to her house anymore. The polite young man is nowhere to be found, and her deed has been signed over to a shell company that sells her house, at an extraordinarily favorable price to –" He waited for me to get it.

"Sharon Stanley. Jeez." The dark sedans drove off, and then the television station stringers. Finally, there was just one vehicle on the road in addition to my Honda and Sharon's two Cadillac Escalades, a little Kia against which leaned a red-haired woman about my age scribbling on a notepad. She straightened up and walked to Sharon's door. Justin closed it in her face.

The woman turned around and headed toward my house. "She's a newspaper reporter," Edward explained.

"Ugh, I just won't answer the door," I said.

He considered this for half a second, then said, "No, if you can, you should talk to her. Deflect suspicion and say something nice about your landlady."

"Say something nice about Sharon, really?" I protested as knocks sounded from downstairs.

"Little white lies make the world go around."

The reporter had her hand raised, ready to knock again, when I pulled open the door. "I'm Katie Marshall of the Peninsula Daily News," she said.

"Hi," I said, adjusting my robe. Over the reporter's shoulder I could see Justin reopening his door to glower at us. "What's going on? Why were all those cars here?"

"You rent this house from Sharon Stanley, right? She's listed as the owner here." I nodded. "Could I come in and ask you a few questions?"

I nodded again, and this time shut the door on Justin's face.

"So," Katie said after I got her some water and pointed her to a seat on the futon sofa, "can I ask first, how long you've been living here?"

"Since September. I got a job teaching English at the high school."

"Okay, great, I graduated from there a few years back," Katie said, writing. "What's your experience been with Ms. Stanley? Have you had any difficulties with her?"

"No," I said, not saying, aside from her nosiness and the fact that her nephew's falsely accusing me of trying to molest him. I waved my hand around. "The house is in good shape, as you can see. She repairs things promptly and the rent's reasonable. What's happened?"

"Ms. Stanley's been arrested in connection with a scheme to cheat people out of their homes in Forks."

I made an appropriate noise of shock. "I would have never guessed that! She was always so nice to me," I said, hoping my lie sounded better to Katie Marshall than it did to me.

Katie leafed through some papers with Clallam County Prosecuting Attorney letterhead. "Yeah, it looks like she's facing charges of filing false documents and grand larceny. And so are a couple of other people in town, like this woman who works at Forks Title Company, Brenda Clapp?" She looked at me. "Do you know her? Married to the football coach?"

My noise of shock was genuine this time. "No, I've never met her," I said truthfully.

Katie seemed disappointed, but nodded. "Did you ever meet Regina Sawyer, who used to own this place?"

I thought back to when Jessica Stanley first showed me around the house. "No, I believe I was told that she had moved into a nursing home," I said. "Is Sharon supposed to have stolen this house too?"

"Yeah, it's on the list."

"I wonder what that means for me," I said, but I was really thinking about Mrs. Sawyer's family. "Is Rob Sawyer related to Regina Sawyer?"

"Do you know Rob?" Katie asked. "He's Mrs. Sawyer's grandson. He was in class with me."

"I've met him at church," I said, not specifying that it was at the food pantry. Maybe Rob wouldn't have to rely on donated food if Sharon and her crew hadn't cheated Mrs. Sawyer. "Is Jessica in trouble too?" I asked, a little maliciously. "She handled the rental of this house to me."

"Jessica Stanley, right? Went to school with her too." Katie looked through her papers again. "As far as I know there's no warrant for her, but I'll put out some calls. Maybe she's being investigated by the prosecuting attorney in Auburn. This sounds like a big enough case."

Katie thanked me and left soon after that. I looked around my living room, at my mother's portrait, at Mrs. Sawyer's old kitchen table, which I used every day. This had been my home while I fell in love, while my life changed forever, so many memories, and now I knew that I should have never have lived here, or at least never have paid rent to Sharon Stanley. Would the Sawyers get their house back?

Edward touched my shoulder, gently drawing me from my reverie. "You did well," he said. "Katie Marshall has a comment for her story that will absolve you from suspicion and a lead on another indictment."

"Did you know that the Clapp's wife was involved?"

"It worked out neatly, didn't it?" Edward said with satisfaction. "Two birds with one stone."

"And Jessica?"

"Is facing some trouble – she got fees in the fraudulent closings, and it'll be difficult for her to claim ignorance with her mother involved. The Stanleys and the Clapps will be dealing with lawyers for years. They'll have no energy for pursuing a phony case against a teacher just so Justin can play football."

I started up the coffeemaker in the kitchen, then leant against the counter, letting the edge press into my back, a new pain that was a distraction from the constant dull pain. "So Esme sent in enough damning documents for the county prosecutor to have sufficient justification to go after Sharon?" I guessed.

"He was delighted. It's an elected position, and this is going to get a lot of attention, this conspiracy to defraud grandmothers." Edward eyed me curiously. "What's bothering you?"

"I'm not sure how I feel about being the impetus for Sharon Stanley's downfall," I said.

"As I said, Sharon and Brenda Clapp would have been caught anyway one day. They're not exactly criminal masterminds. Think of it this way, you're the impetus for making Forks a better place." He stepped to me and curved a hand around my neck. "The world is a better place for you being in it. Think about that too."

-έπ-

In the days that followed, I slept and took long, slow walks in the forest with Edward, who had arranged to do his finals remotely and get the rest of the school year off - something to do with a medical research project at the University of Washington. The woods and meadows were bursting with color now: harebells and Indian thistle, fairy slippers and avalanche lily, trillium and bleeding heart, the pastels of late spring and new life. Even the slash field was regenerating, dotted with pale purple selfheal, able to breathe since Edward had cleared it.

And we talked. Or rather Edward talked and I listened as he mused on the benefits of a vampire existence, still trying to persuade me, though careful not to use the techniques on me that he had used on Bob Banner and Roxanne Stevens to get his leave.

On Saturday, I (and more effectively, Alice) persuaded Edward to go hunting while Angela drove me to Port Angeles for yoga with Lakshmi/Lauren Mallory and a visit to the farmers market. And Angela, sweetheart that she was, was more than willing to help me out. I hoped she and Raquel would stay friends, after. Our conversation on the way was, naturally, the Stanley-Clapp fraud news; Angela was outraged, able to count five families she knew personally who had been victimized.

Angela and I stopped by the church on the way back to drop off the farmers' donations to the pantry. When we were done, she asked if I'd mind waiting while she did a quick task in her dad's office, and I agreed readily, knowing that Edward would be back soon, but not yet. As Angela went around to the back, I stepped into the sanctuary. There was scaffolding and drop cloths along the right side of the church; a generous donor was paying for repairs, a donor anonymous to everyone else but me.

I sat down in Edward and Esme's usual pew, next to the stained-glass window depicting Pentecost. The artist had been earnest but not greatly skilled, and the flames of the Holy Spirit descending upon the hunched, gaping disciples looked instead like drops of blood. Did it hurt when the flames landed? Was there pain in receiving this gift from heaven? Were the recipients sorry they got it?

"Crude, isn't it?" a voice said near me. "When I visited New York, I got to see churches with Tiffany windows, and I became terribly envious." It was Angela's father, Pastor Weber, in a sweat-stained Udub T-shirt.

"Hey, Dan. Just back from your run?"

He sat in the pew in front of me and turned around to face me, a wiry arm resting on the top of the seatback. "Yep. How is everything, Bella?"

"Fine," I said automatically, then grimaced. "Well, not fine. Did Angela tell you?"

"She did. I'm so sorry. You know you have our support. How are you feeling?"

"I'm okay for now. If my back didn't hurt like hell, I wouldn't know I was sick."

"Ah. But when you need it, we can set up a meal rota, we can drive you to appointments – "

"I have a question," I interrupted him, and he blinked and nodded. "What if you were offered immortality, but the price was that somebody else would die? It would be unethical to accept, right? More plainly, it would be a sin, wouldn't it? In the grand scheme of things, my life isn't worth more than anyone else's."

He tilted his head, puzzled at this hypothetical. He of course wouldn't know how real it was.

"But what if was less clear-cut: You could have eternal life, but there was a possibility that someone else would die? Say, if you, I don't know, behaved in a certain way, never straying from the path of rectitude, nobody would be hurt. But if you didn't, if you made a mistake, you would kill someone? What would your ethical choice be then? Or would it be a sin not to accept it, since refusing it would be akin to suicide?"

He smiled gently. "Since there's only one source of eternal life—" he pointed to the altar, where the cross was "— that's not a choice we have to make. God would never ask that of us."

I considered that a moment. No, an all-beneficent God wouldn't do that. But since I wasn't sure I believed in God anyway, I had to rely on reason, not faith.

In the meantime, though, Pastor Weber was looking at me inquisitively. I could leave him thinking that I was kind of nuts, or I could throw him a bone.

"That's all just a metaphor," I lied, waving my hand dismissively, then sighing for effect. "So, it's the sort of cancer that has a poor prognosis, as Angela must have said to you. My mother died of cancer, after years of painful treatment, and I told myself that when I was in a similar situation that I wouldn't bother, that the balance of misery to extended life wasn't worth it, that the incredible waste involved – do you have any idea how much pollution that cancer treatment, the chemo and radiation, causes? So much degradation of the earth for a few weeks of prolonged pain.

"But now - Angela doesn't know this, and please don't tell anyone - now I've been offered an experimental treatment that could kill me, or that could cure me. And the cure comes at a price." I hesitated, thinking about how I could phrase this for innocent ears, how to be vague yet plausible.

"And what is it?"

"Um, the treatment involves lethal substances that the doctors aren't sure how to handle and don't know how to dispose of safely – it's like nuclear waste, you can try to contain it, but you can't render it harmless. But these doctors are very excited about it, and they're pushing me to try it even if they aren't sure of the consequences."

"That sounds questionable in terms of medical ethics. This is at Fred Hutch?"

"It's more a consortium, doctors from different institutions," I said. "It's really experimental, for people who have no other options – you may have heard about some of the tests involving immunotherapy, you know, like giving patients a vaccine to fight the cancer cells. It's sort of like that. I would go in knowing all these uncertainties, and that my decision could save me yet endanger someone else."

"But these other people are aware of the dangers involved, right?"

"Well," I said slowly, "the doctors are aware, sure, but someone else might encounter the … uh, substances inadvertently, say, and get hurt. And I would be – not toxic, exactly, but kind of infectious for a while. And it's probably all for nothing, of course."

Dan looked at the drops of fire in the window, and turned back to me. "Not all dilemmas can be neatly resolved. There may be no right answer here. But there is a right question: how would your decision make you feel?

"Um, conflicted, I guess."

Dan gave me a rueful smile in return for my unhelpful answer. "It's not quite parallel, but let's go back to the question the way you posed it earlier," he said. "In return for immortality, you would be tempted to kill someone else – not required, but tempted. You would have to find the strength not to kill, and you'd have to take the risk of making a mistake. Do you remember the Parable of the Talents in Matthew?"

I nodded. I'd gone to church enough to have heard the Bible story of the master dividing up money among his servants and then returning from a journey to see what they had done with it. Two had invested their various numbers of gold talents and doubled their money, to the master's approval; the third had hidden his share in the ground, afraid of losing it.

"It was the servants who had taken risks who were rewarded, while the one who played it safe was punished," Dan reminded me. "In the context of the Gospel, the third servant lost everything and the first two were given eternal life. So are you willing to take the risk?"

-έπ-

Dan had offered me no easy answers, but had given me something to think about, and I did think about it as Angela drove me home, entertaining me with rumors about prom dates, passing on Ron Jefferson's report of his time with the editors of Manicule Press, about the rewriting he had to do.

"And," she said, "it's not official yet, but the seniors have voted to ask you to speak at graduation."

"Really?" I shook my head. "Sympathy vote, I guess."

"I think that plays a role," Angela agreed, and reached over to pat my arm. "But you have to realize, you had every one of those kids this year. They got to know you pretty well."

I exhaled heavily. "They might want to wait and see how I look in June."

When we got to my house, I assured Angela that I was fine on my own, but that I would, I promised, let her help again. She watched me as I walked up to my door, pulling away only as I stepped inside. I dropped my bags of produce and stretched, groaning a bit at the discomfort.

When my eyes adjusted to the darkness of my living room, I realized that there was a vampire in my house. Nothing usual about that - except that this vampire was one I had never met before.

Chapter title: "My secret," by Klee.

Templo de la Preciosa Sangre – Church of the Precious Blood. Which is a real church in Mexico, although not in Monterrey.

So I guess I can say now that this story was inspired in part by "Breaking Bad," the part where Walt doesn't want to get treatment for lung cancer, but is pressured into it, and events spiral downward from there. Of course, if he hadn't gotten the treatment, we wouldn't have had the great show that we did.

And the bit about people getting vaccines for cancer is indeed true. The idea is to use the patient's own white blood cells to devise a personalized vaccine with custom antibodies. A member of my family is in one of the trials, and if it works, it would be a huge step.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!