Recap: Last chapter, a Seattle doctor confirms Carlisle's diagnosis; Edward tries to persuade Bella to undergo treatment and she flees to Raquel's apartment. Edward apologizes and Bella finally tells him the whole story of her family's propensity for cancer, one that goes back to 19th-century Isabel Salazar, ancestress of both Charlie and Renee. Bella announces to her classes that she's ill, and goes on leave. Sharon Stanley and Bruce Clapp's wife are arrested for defrauding poor and elderly people of their homes, arrests prompted by information supplied by the Cullens. Angela tells Bella that she's probably going to be asked to speak at graduation. She visits Angela's father, Pastor Weber, and lays out her problem in veiled terms: Was it ethical to accept a "cancer treatment" that might harm other people? He tells her of the Biblical parable of the talents, of the need to face challenges and take risks. Contemplating this, Bella returns home to find that a vampire she's never met is in her house.

RIP Pat Conroy, who died as I was writing this, though I'm still going to make fun of him.

Thanks to Camilla10, always, and to Mr. Price, whose birthday is today!

Chapter 20: Entre le royaume des vivants et des morts

I gaped at the vampire in my living room for a second, then closed my eyes, absurdities running through my head:

If you encounter a bear on the trail: Back away slowly and avoid eye contact.

Mountain lion: Wave hands and throw rocks.

Angry shapeshifter: Pray and hope it's over quickly.

Vampire who wants to kill you: Pray faster.

"Oh, calm down, drama queen," said a voice that was part amused and part contemptuous. The beautiful timbre somehow made the contempt even more cutting. "If I wanted it, you'd be dead already."

I blinked at the vision in my humble house: shining blond hair, flawless skin, lush lashes, full red lips, long, long legs in skinny jeans and a, yes, killer body. Not an angular supermodel's figure, but a luscious Playboy one, the kind to make guys drool. Women, meanwhile, would be blown away by the perfection of her face. Edward was Edward and I'd always melt for him, but I'd have to give the most-beautiful-person-in-the-world award to this creature.

"Rosalie?" I finally got out. I'd seen her before, but at a distance, at the Holiday Hop; she'd looked otherworldly there in the high school gym, and proximity only heightened the effect.

"Took you long enough," she drawled. "Sit down, I'm going to talk to you."

I didn't move. "Where's Edward?"

Rosalie waved a hand dismissively. "Racing back here at a great rate of speed, if Alice called him. But I'm going to guess she didn't."

I relaxed a tiny bit. Alice wouldn't call him if I wasn't in danger. In fact, if I were in danger, Alice would be here herself. So instead of following Rosalie's orders, I carried my bags to the kitchen and started loading milk and eggs into the refrigerator. Rosalie sighed ostentatiously, then sat on my futon sofa.

Figuring I had delayed enough, I closed the refrigerator door and went to settle onto the other end of the sofa.

"What's your problem?" Rosalie said without preamble.

I raised my eyebrows. "You mean, other than having a terminal disease?"

"Yes. You should let Edward change you."

"Why would you want me to be one of you?" I frowned at her in confusion. "You voted to kill me."

She waved another elegantly dismissive hand. "I did, but that was back before it became obvious you had to be Edward's partner. I admit, there's a small part of me that admires you for wanting to stay human, but the much bigger part is furious: Every minute you do stay human, you endanger my family."

That startled me – I hadn't really thought about it that way - and Rosalie saw it. She leaned forward. "Every time Edward exposes himself to save you from a skidding van, every time some idiot like Clapp threatens to draw public attention to you, every time some stupid dog is on the verge of blowing up as he confronts you at the coin laundry is a time the Volturi could take an interest in us."

I managed to get a hold of myself a little, and said, "Once I'm … gone, you won't have to worry about that."

She snorted at that. "Oh, and when Edward goes to the Volturi after you're 'gone,' you don't think they'll react to that? They'll be aghast to learn that we harbored a little human who knew what we are. They'll come here, discover the existence of the wolves, and wipe out them and their mates. Including your friend Raquel? Not 'gone'- dead. As a result of your choice." She narrowed her eyes at me, displeased at my lack of response. "But you appear to know this already."

"Well, Edward laid out that exact scenario to Seth, in this room, when he found out that Jacob was thinking of accusing me of moral turpitude or whatever." I rubbed my back absently. "But why would that happen now? Why would Edward go to the Volturi? You guys keep away from them."

"So they could put him out of his misery, of course."

I certainly had a reaction to that. "What?!" It was more a squeak than a question.

"When vampires lose their mate, they seek oblivion. The most efficient way to find it is to find the Volturi. It's not as if a grieving vampire is thinking about the consequences to everyone else." Rosalie's lip curled. "The way I see it, Edward will rush to Italy, reveal all, and bring the wrath of Volturi on Cullen and Quileute alike. But you don't DIDN'T THINK ABOUT THAT? YOU DON"T care, do you? You'll be safely out of the picture."

The thought of Edward doing this propelled me from the sofa. "But I don't get it," I said, starting to pace in my agitation. "Edward told me about that Volturi guy who misses his mate after millennia. He's still with us."

"You mean Marcus," Rosalie said, and shook her head. "The only reason he's still around is that nobody would agree to tear his head off. The other chief Volturi, Aro and Caius, need him for the power balance. They'd destroy anyone who dared to lay a hand on one of the triumvirate. But killing some American pipsqueak? All in a day's amusement."

I stopped pacing, disturbed but not entirely sure Rosalie was giving me the truth. "Why hasn't Edward told me this?"

"Because he thinks it's emotional blackmail," she said. "Which it is, but I don't care."

I collapsed onto my sofa, because I could completely see Edward thinking this. Dammit! All this time, I'd been whining about bad genes and bad luck, and he had been quietly contemplating his own, well, nonexistence.

Rosalie leaned forward again, pressing her advantage. "You see, it's not all about you. It's about your friends, my family, Edward." She eyed me a moment, then went on. "Just as when your mother decided to go through treatment, it was about her family, not just herself."

That was going too far. "It was the wrong decision," I said sharply. "And it didn't involve the possibility that she'd kill someone."

"She gave you several more years of herself – what greater gift could there be? And existing entails the possibility that you'll kill someone, whether you're human or vampire," Rosalie shot back. "You hit somebody with your car, you knock over a candle and start a fire, you go deer-hunting and take out a hiker instead." She didn't specify if the last calamity involved a vampire. "Possibilities. But if you don't take this chance, you'll definitely be responsible for deaths. For many deaths.

"Whereas if you change, you may well never err from the right path as is common to mankind," she said. She was paraphrasing one of the Greeks – Sophocles? I wondered irrelevantly.

"Me, I've never tasted human blood," she went on. I looked at her dubiously, because I distinctly remembered Edward saying that all the Cullens save Carlisle had a rap sheet, and she continued: "That doesn't mean I haven't killed anyone, because I have. But they were carefully planned-out executions, nothing in the heat of the moment." She said that last part as if that were better.

I instinctively shrank back into my corner of the sofa, and Rosalie rolled her eyes. "For heaven's sake. Didn't Edward tell you my story?"

"What story?"

"I was gang-raped and left to die in Rochester," she said bluntly, "but Carlisle found me and changed me. For a long time, I couldn't be grateful about it, because what was so special about me that I should exist forever, a girl who'd been so stupid to get raped, who'd been abandoned in the street like so much trash?"

"But that's not your fault," I protested.

"Thank you, child of the 21st century. That wasn't what we said about rape victims in 1933."

"Oh," I said, blinking in shock. "That's terrible. And those are the men –"

"Five of them. Never to rape again. And never to convince themselves that it was all just a youthful indiscretion, because if I was never going to grow old, neither were they. Before they died they were thoroughly convinced of their transgression," she said with satisfaction. "But getting over my own sense of unworthiness – well, that'll be an eternal journey. Is that your problem?'

"What?" I said again.

"Your problem. You feel unworthy? You don't think you deserve to live? You have deficient genes, so you'll just reject any solution that will keep you on this planet? Normally, I'd say, 'There's nothing special about you, go ahead, die, it's the normal course of events.' And the truth is that there is nothing special about you."

A flash of annoyance won out over intimidation. "God, what float in the Asshole Parade did you ride in on?" I muttered.

She ignored that. "There is nothing special about you – except to Edward. Where would he find another woman who smells as good as you, whose mind is closed to him, and who can abide his personality? And even if he somehow did, he wouldn't be interested." Suddenly she was standing, and I automatically scrambled to my feet as a defensive measure. "Speak of the devil and he shall appear."

A second later, my back door opened, and Edward and his beautiful sister were hissing at each other like a pair of big cats – a jaguar versus a mountain lion. I couldn't understand what they were saying, and that was probably all for the better. Finally, the lion hissed particularly loudly and the jaguar stepped back and pivoted toward me.

"Bella, think about what I told you," Rosalie said.

"I will," I replied, and she nodded once and headed toward the door Edward had just used. "But, Rosalie," I called after her, "you should know that my self-esteem is just fine."

She barked a laugh at that and disappeared.

I looked up at the man whose body was now caging me, and glared. "I don't know whether to shout at you or kiss you," I told him, repeating the words he had said to me in Seattle several days earlier.

He dropped his arms, and I immediately missed them. He seemed particularly human just after hunting, as perverse as that might have seemed - the lightness of his eyes, the hint of color in his cheeks, the wildness of the woods on his skin. No matter.

"You misled me," I said, and he didn't flinch at my accusation. He had heard, one way or another, Rosalie's scenario. "You didn't tell me that somebody would be happy to snap your head off when you asked."

He shrugged. "Why would I tell you such a thing? It would be, as Rosalie said, emotional blackmail."

"So I could stop you!"

"How, exactly?"

"Tell me that you won't go to the Volturi."

"I wouldn't," he said. "Rosalie's right – my family would be destroyed." I exhaled in relief, but he went on, the calmness of his voice at odds with the horror of his words, "I would find other vampires. The nomads who killed the Teagues and burned down our house, for instance – they deserve some trouble in return for the trouble they caused us. Or I would just cross the border into La Push."

"Other vampires could kill you?" The Cullens were less immortal than I had thought. "No," I cried, my voice cracking, and grabbed his arm. "You have to promise me you won't."

Despair settled on his face, and he disengaged himself from my grip. "You can't ask me to do that. Think about it: If I were human in this situation, would you demand that I be by myself the rest of my life, that I never fall in love again, never touch someone again?"

I had to confess to myself a pang of jealousy, but I shook my head. "Of course not."

"But that's what you're asking of me now." His eyes grew distant, seeing a future I never would. "You're asking me to linger on, perhaps for centuries, always alone, after experiencing for a very brief time what it is like to have a lover. If I thought I was lonely sometimes before you – it will be nothing compared to how I will feel after."

His eyes returned to me, and he bracketed my head with his hands. "My body may be 17, but my mind is not, and I know this: You are irreplaceable, and the part of me you will take with you is irreplaceable too. You talked with Rosalie about Marcus. I wouldn't wish his existence on anyone." His thumbs brushed away the tears running down my cheeks. I was crying again over Edward Cullen.

"I'm sorry that Rosalie invaded your house," he said, and urged me back onto the sofa.

I sank into it gratefully. "S'okay. She thinks I'm being selfish."

Edward snorted next to me. "That's rich coming from her. Everything, for her, revolves around her wants, her needs, her comforts. She's my sister, and I saw first-hand the effects of the reprehensible things that were done to her, but she was harsh to others before, and she remains so."

"But you would be selfish to do what you're planning," I said. "Even without the Volturi involved, your family would be devastated –"

"You, of all people, should understand," he interrupted me, and nodded toward Raquel's portrait of Renee on the wall. "Your mother suffered physically; I would suffer … in other ways. I must have a way out."

"No."

His voice was hard. "My existence, my choice."

My choice, my decision, my own words being thrown back at me. I leaned my head against Edward's solid shoulder. Whatever I did, there would be damage. If I accepted his offer, chances were that some human would suffer the consequences. If I left this life, the man I loved would suffer in ways beyond what I could comprehend; if he left it, his family would suffer. What was ethical was not clear-cut. What I wanted – Edward whole and happy – was. But the step to making that happen was like leaping from a cliff.

"Pastor Dan thinks I'm being a coward." I sniffled.

He took my hand, and pressed his lips to my palm. "Ah, you were in the church. That's why I smell paint thinner in your clothes."

"That's great, you guys paying for the renovation."

He shrugged again. "Why does Dan Weber say you are a coward?"

I recounted Dan's evocation of the parable of the talents in the New Testament, about the servant punished for not taking a risk, and Edward nodded thoughtfully. "You're not a coward. You're a realist. The risk is there, no matter what we do to reduce the odds it will happen. But –"he added, raising a finger when I tried to speak – "you have to think about the other part of the parable, too. What the master says to the servants who double his money."

"'Nice job'?" I guessed.

"He calls them faithful servants," Edward said. "The master's not rewarding them for succeeding, but for being 'faithful,' for trying - just as, as a teacher, you're disappointed by a lack of work, not by a lack of perfection. You are praiseworthy not for not killing, but for making the effort."

"That will be cold comfort to the hiker I drain," I pointed out.

"Or to the pedestrian you hit with your car," Edward replied. "You know, when you're a vampire, the chances of your doing that are nil – human drivers, though, kill a lot of people. Yet still they drive. Even that van driver who nearly crushed you is still on the road. The point is, humans and Cullens alike, we go through our days trying to do no harm. Neither always succeed."

We were silent a moment, and then I took my step toward the precipice. "I'll do it," I said abruptly.

His body seemed to freeze next to me. "Are you sure?" he asked as if he were afraid of hearing the answer.

"As long as you promise that you'll always be part of this," I said, flapping my hands vaguely toward a future that we could share. "I've said it before: my hesitation has not been you or your family, or anything that I would give up. The only person I would deeply regret is Raquel, and now she's in on all this, and Yolanda…" I trailed off, thinking of my surrogate mother in Laconia. I would miss her. "Anyway, what's stopped me has always been the possibility that I could kill, and I'd like to think that I'd feel remorseful about that –"

"You would," he said, in the tone of a man who had experienced just that.

"And it's kind of shameful to admit, to say that it's even more than not wanting to be a killer, is the sense that I don't deserve -"

"You do," Edward insisted. "And I heard you tell Rosalie your self-esteem was fine."

"Yeah, but …it's not that," I grimaced and shifted positions. I was due another pill soon. "I've read that lottery winners have to justify their good fortune to themselves, that they search for the reason God chose them to get all the money, and not some other guy. They tell themselves that it's part of God's plan. They're uneasy, because if they accept the idea that it's just random luck that made them win, it's possible that random luck will strike again and take everything away."

I frowned, trying to work this out. "So what is the plan? Why do I deserve an extension of my existence when all the other people with terminal cancer don't get one? And why do I deserve you?"

"I'm hardly a lottery prize to be won," Edward said dryly.

"Well, you don't see yourself clearly," I said.

"But," he went on, "I prefer to think that you and I were made for each other, that there is a plan. You can somehow abide me, and I find you" – he touched my temple, which covered my silent mind, and then my sternum, which protected my soon to stop beating heart – "perfect."

I grabbed his hand and held it to my chest. "You're the one who's perfect."

"You will have all the time you want to discover my many flaws," he said, then smiled ruefully. "Can you think of that as the price you'll pay for immortality?"

"Nobody would think that."

"Rosalie would, I assure you." He moved our hands so he could smell my wrist again, and shook his head. "There's more. It will hurt."

"Changing will? How much?" I still hadn't learned much about the mechanics of all this despite all Edward's talk about life as a vampire, presumably because it wasn't a selling point.

He looked at Renee's portrait again. "You remember how much pain your mother went through?"

"Certainly."

"Imagine what it would have been like without painkillers." I could do that, because at the end, the painkillers hadn't done Renee much good. "Now imagine all that concentrated in three days."

We sat in silence for a while, my stomach roiling, before Edward said, "I'm sorry. You safe and changed is the most wonderful gift that I can imagine, but it wrecks me that you have to go through all this."

I reached up to touch his cheek. "But I would have gone through it anyway. I'm human. Even having seen how my mother died, I would hang on until it's unbearable." I frowned. "Which doesn't make the prospect of enduring pain in a different way any more appealing."

"Carlisle has some ideas. Maybe they'll work." He sighed. "There's yet another price you'll have to pay, and it's a heavy one: the constant vigilance you'll feel compelled to maintain around humans."

"Like you do around me?" I said, a little sadly.

"That's a price I'm willing to pay," he said. "And it's at a lower and lower cost." He took another inhalation, my wrist against his face. "I can smell the malignancy now."

"Oh," I murmured, my heart speeding.

"Indeed," he said.

I exhaled. "We need to talk with Raquel."

Two weeks later, the gold-capped members of the Forks High School Class of 2012 were sitting in the first few rows of folding chairs on the basketball court facing the stage, family and friends spread out behind them. The teachers and staff were on the bleachers; Angela and Barbara Goff, the graduate wranglers, had made sure their charges were in the right order; Ethan Yorkie turned off the loop of "Pomp and Circumstance."

Me, I was on the stage. I had indeed been selected by the seniors as the faculty speaker, so I was seated a few feet above Edward, who was the end of the first row of graduates next to Alice; Esme and Carlisle were in the back. I shared the stage with Bob Banner and Roxanne Stevens the guidance counselor, and Gracie Alvarez and Eliza Teague, the valedictorian and salutatorian. There was also a guest speaker: the Clallam County prosecuting attorney, all lawyerly suit and puffy politician's hair – he'd been invited several weeks earlier, before the news broke of the Forks deed-fraud case. Bruce Clapp, husband of one of the defendants, looked sullen in his seat in the bleachers.

And right next to me was Raquel, who was, in effect, my cane, my walker. I didn't look like someone on her deathbed, but I was paler and thinner. More important, my balance had deteriorated since my diagnosis, and exertion made my breaths hurt; my blood now smelled of opioids and cancer not just to Carlisle and Edward, but to all the Cullens. No longer capable of speaking extemporaneously, I had written out my little speech so that I wouldn't space out mid-sentence in front of the hundreds of people in the audience and just gape at Edward in admiration the way I sometimes did at home.

Eliza and Gracie spoke of hopes and dreams and immigration reform, making Bob Banner and the ambitious politician stare uncomfortably at their shoes, and then it was my turn. Raquel held my arm and guided me to the lectern.

I avoided Edward's worried gaze and sought out Alice. She nodded in encouragement. So far, so good. "I'm honored that the Class of 2012 asked me to speak today," I started. Shelby Wells's new baby let out a wail. "But it's odd in some ways, because I'm only a few years older than you, and with any luck, you'll be living a lot more years than I will. So although it's traditional to give advice in these speeches, I won't do that.

"I've been here only since September, so I didn't have the opportunity to see you grow up. But I've had the privilege to see you mature … most of you at least –" there was a titter of laughter at this " – as we talked about Oedipus's hubris and Madame Bovary's fate, about Candide's view of the world, about whether Romeo and Juliet were tragic lovers or impulsive adolescent fools, about whether 'The Prince of Tides' has any claim to being an actual piece of literature." There was another ripple of polite laughter at this and I smiled, because I'd left my mark on the English curriculum: "The Prince of Tides" was definitely not going to be next summer's reading assignment.

"And I've had the privilege to live in this beautiful place." I carefully clutched one edge of the lectern with one hand and gestured around the decidedly unbeautiful gym with the other. "You may be used to it, but I come from a corner of Arizona that's all heat and rock, where the mighty Colorado River shrinks to a trickle and dies before it can reach the sea that used to be its destination. I've loved seeing the ocean and hiking in the mountains here, and, most of all, running on the trail behind my house.

"I've loved the alders losing their greenery and the firs keeping theirs. I've loved seeing a field of slash finally coming back to life, finally recovering from the injury done to it. I've loved discovering that this is a place where you can find friends, where love can find you and where justice will be served." I saw Bruce Clapp shift uneasily on his bench.

"So I guess I do have one piece of advice: to appreciate the beauty that's here and to strive to keep it. If you do just that, you'll have gone a long way to making the world a better place. Thank you for this year, and congratulations to the Class of 2012."

Angela had invited people over to her house after the ceremony, and so Raquel and I found ourselves around a table with her, Tyler and Mike, who had abandoned Newton's Outfitters on its busiest day to say goodbye to me. For this was what it was, a subdued farewell meal with these three friends whom I'd come to respect and even admire. Friends whose concern for me I had to repay with lies.

"Raquel and I are going down to Arizona tomorrow so I can see my dad," I told them when Tyler asked about my plans. Edward had urged me to say goodbye to Charlie, to make a last stab at coming to terms with him while I was still human. "Then I'm going into hospice back here."

Angela inhaled with a little gasp of surprise. "At your house?"

"No, it's a little too inconvenient, Dr. Cullen thinks. I'm going to Raquel's first, then to a place in Seattle that he recommended, near Raquel."

"Dr. Cullen's a cancer doctor?" Mike asked.

"No, but he's been really helpful in all this," I said. Indeed, as my body broke down, Carlisle was with me almost as much as Edward was.

"Yeah, because Bella's been the only teacher his weird, asocial son has ever talked to," Raquel put in, answering Mike's hint of suspicion with a hint of mischief. I stared intently at the plate of pasta I had barely touched.

"That's probably true," Angela said. "Edward Cullen certainly never actually talked to me. Bella, can we come visit?"

"Of course," I answered, though the real answer was "absolutely not." "Maybe next weekend? Though I may be on a drip, so I might not be much fun. And," I added hesitantly, "I should tell you, I've signed all the state forms, you know, for self-administering medication, when it's time." I glanced at Raquel, who had been one of the witnesses along with Charlotte Gerandy's doctor husband.

There was an awkward silence at that.

"Are you in a lot of pain?" Mike finally asked. I thought of the amber bottles in my knapsack, the long-acting painkillers and the pills for breakthrough pain, and of Carlisle's little clear vials of morphine sulfate.

"Yes," I said simply, and he cringed. .

That, at least, wasn't a lie.

"How are you feeling?" Raquel asked as she drove me home.

"I'm more nervous now than I was before my speech," I said.

"Yeah, I'm sorry I can't tell you more than what Seth told me – and you know how little he can tell me."

"I know." As a linguistics junkie, I had to marvel over the fact that the wolves essentially had mental gag orders that could be imposed by their "alpha"; as someone who needed to talk to Jacob, I found it immensely frustrating. "You've been great in all this, Raquel, dealing with both sides—"

"What else would I do?" she said, cutting me off. She turned my Civic into my driveway, and her frown turned into an expression of disgust. "Dammit. Your criminal neighbor is heading over."

By now Raquel knew all about how Justin Stanley and Bruce Clapp had tried to discredit me, and how the Cullens had paid them back. I turned my head to see Sharon Stanley and her stiff curls crossing the road. Raquel pulled the key from the ignition and touched my knee. "Wait and let me help you out of the car."

A few seconds later, Raquel opened my door and supported me as I pulled myself out of the passenger side. "Hi, Sharon," I said to my landlady, who seemed to have aged 20 years since her arraignment. "You remember my friend Raquel?"

"Um, sure," she said, but her eyes were on me. "I haven't received a rent check from you this month. If you write one out to me now, I won't charge a late fee."

I stared at her in confusion. "But I sent one."

"I didn't get it. So give me another check now, and I'll tear up the other one if it shows up."

"I don't understand. The lawyers told me to send it to the escrow account that's been set up for your tenants."

Sharon looked so dismayed by my answer that I felt sorry for her. But Raquel, her mind working faster than mine, spat out, "You asshole, trying to rip off a sick woman! You're not entitled to that rent money, and you know it. It's going to go to the people you ripped off already."

Sharon's face crumpled. "I'm going to lose my cars," she moaned.

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you leased big-ass loaded S.U.V.s." Raquel jerked a thumb toward the Escalades in Sharon's driveway.

"I need to get to my job at the Thriftway," Sharon muttered. I wondered if she was working alongside some of her victims there.

"Do you want my car?" I asked. Raquel and Sharon looked at me in astonishment, and I shrugged. It wasn't as if I was going to need it, and Raquel was going to get enough money from my estate to buy any car she wanted, if she even wanted one at all. "I'll give it to you."

"Um, I guess," Sharon said uncertainly, squinting at my well-worn Honda.

"I'll ask the lawyer to do the title transfer –"

"Yeah, you know all about property transfers, don't you?" Raquel snarked at Sharon.

"Raquel, give her the key – fuck!" I grabbed the open passenger door, though what I really wanted to do was double over as pain stabbed my midsection.

"Shit, Bella, your pills!" Raquel cried.

"What's going on?" Sharon asked.

As Raquel dumped the contents of my knapsack on the passenger seat in search of the right amber bottle, I was suddenly scooped up and cradled against a hard chest. "I've got her, Raquel," Carlisle Cullen said, then lower, to me, "Edward's got a syringe for you inside."

I whimpered into his shirt and I heard Sharon call out as Carlisle carried me through my front door, "What about the key?"

A needle jab in my thigh, then a transfer to another pair of stone arms. "Just a few minutes, baby," Edward said. "I'm going to put you down on the sofa."

"The meeting, Edward…"

"They'll wait."

I felt the futon against my back. "Just keep touching me."

"Of course."

Conversations swirled around us, but I couldn't care about speculation over Sharon's reaction to seeing Carlisle in my house, couldn't care that Edward was reading Raquel's thoughts and trying to read Seth's; I could care only about the feel of Edward's arms bracing mine, about his scent in my head as I tried to breathe evenly and waited for the pain to recede.

Which it did, if not quickly enough. I opened my eyes to meet Edward's. "I can go now."

He helped me up, and Carlisle handed me a glass of water. "How are you feeling?" he asked me.

I swallowed a sip. "Okay, I guess. Kinda numb? That's a good thing."

Edward scowled and said, still looking at me, "Seth, no offense, but your packmaster is an idiot."

Seth finished pulling his T-shirt over his head and said, "The alpha might not always be right, but he's always the alpha." He handed the shirt to Raquel and added, "Speaking of alpha males, you guys might want to turn your backs."

"Biologists don't believe in alphas in wolf packs anymore," Carlisle observed.

"Huh," Seth said, tilting his head thoughtfully. "Well, we still do."

"Whatever," I put in, "no changing in my house. Take your pants off outside."

Soon we were all outside, Seth in wolf form, Raquel on his back, me nestled in Edward's arms. "Go at an easy pace," he told Seth. "It'll be more comfortable for Bella."

Easy pace. I was able to snicker a little at that, this easy pace that was far faster than Raquel or I could have ever managed.

The runners set out on the marked trail at first, but then turned off, following an invisible path that ascended until the hardwoods disappeared, and the clouds did too. The colder air felt sharp going into my sloshy lungs.

"What is this place?" Raquel murmured when we emerged in a small, triangular meadow that was oddly well-populated with supernatural creatures, some of them glinting here above the clouds. She dismounted her wolf ride and shrugged off her knapsack filled with Seth's clothes; he picked it up with his teeth and trotted into the trees.

"Neutral territory," Carlisle answered her after embracing his enthusiastic wife and nodding to Alice, Jasper, Rosalie and Emmett.

"Your throne, madam," Emmett said as he snapped open a camp chair for me. Edward and Raquel took up positions alongside it.

"Hello, gentlemen," Carlisle said to the Quileute at the other end of the clearing. "Would you approach? That way Bella and Raquel can be fully part of the discussion."

After a few moments, Jacob Black and his band, three of them bipedal, three not, moved toward us. As they neared, though, the wolf versions snarled and recoiled, and Jacob reproved them in Quileute.

"What's wrong?" I asked Edward.

He leaned down to whisper in my ear, "They can smell the cancer too."

His words were confirmed by Jacob's. "Damn, Bella, you really are sick."

"Did you think I was lying to you?" Seth said, offended, as he strode out of the woods with his empty knapsack.

"I have a healthy skepticism about anything that vampires say," Jacob said.

"Be that as it may," Carlisle put in, "thank you for finally meeting with us." There was a slight emphasis on the adverb, because it had taken a lot of strategizing by the Cullens and Raquel, and a lot of pleading by Seth, to get Jacob to agree to talk about my changing. At first he refused to meet at all; then he insisted that I be there (which alarmed and angered Edward and made Raquel insistent that she be there, which alarmed Seth); then he quibbled about the meeting place.

Was he delaying to get his head around the idea, or to consult with the Quileute elders, or to put us at a disadvantage? We didn't know, because he'd forbidden Seth to talk to us about it, and while Edward had picked up a good bit of Quileute vocabulary, he reported that even Seth's mind was murky when he was with us, as if his brain language center had a wall around it on the subject.

"The treaty expressly says that you can't kill a human," Jacob said, forgoing any niceties.

"They're not killing Bella, they're saving her," Raquel said impatiently.

Jacob shot daggers at her. "The treaty expressly says that the Cullens can't kill or change a human," he said.

"And that's why we're here to negotiate an exception," Carlisle said smoothly.

"What will you do if we say no?" Jacob asked.

"Bella will be changed anyway," Edward said. "And you won't get anything out of it."

"Except revenge," Jacob said. The wolves made little noises of approval at this.

"We are not negotiating from a position of weakness," Esme said sharply. "You know that we can overpower you, and we have chosen not to."

"Not when you're alone," Jacob pointed out.

And there was the crux of the matter. Edward would change me no matter what – indeed, it rankled him that he had to make a show of asking Jacob for permission - but the family would always have to be on alert for a lupine assassination team showing up when, say, one of us was out hunting solo or doing the graveyard shift at the hospital, and Alice wouldn't be able to see it coming. The idea that I could be the precipitating cause of a Cullen's demise was excruciating, and it was the reason I insisted we at least try to get the wolves on board.

"Why are you doing this, Jacob?" I said, breaking the silence that had fallen.

"This is not what I would have wanted for you," he said, his gaze shifting from me to the vampire next to me. Edward growled under his breath, and I grabbed his hand.

"You mean, not dying?" I asked Jacob, my voice harder.

"I mean, not being controlled by a cold, disgusting –"

This time it was Esme who growled, and quite audibly. "Watch it, Black," she said.

Jacob sighed. "Is this what you really want?" he asked me.

I regarded him with weariness. "My brain is going, but yes, I'm capable of making decisions about myself, thank you very much. I really am sick, and I really want this. And I would hope you have better sense than to think that revenge is the best thing you can get out of it."

Seth said something full of glottal stops and different kinds of Ks in Quileute. Jacob nodded, and Edward reacted, but only by squeezing my hand slightly. I slumped a little in relief.

"To allow this huge, massive violation of the treaty," Jacob announced, "this is what we want: a guarantee that there won't be another generation like this one. So many lives ruined by your presence." He gestured to the pack around him, and while Seth looked pretty comfortable in his skin, it was undeniable that some of the other wolves, most especially Jacob, didn't. "Maybe Noah will manage to finish ninth grade when you're gone," he added, pointing to the younger Quileute I remembered from the race at Lake Sylvia.

"So," he went on, "You promise that you'll leave Forks now and never come back to the Olympic Peninsula as long as there are Quileute in La Push –"

"That's impossible," Rosalie said. "We're the biggest private landowner on the peninsula."

"And you give the land you control this side of Mount Olympus to the tribe."

"And that's outrageous!" Rosalie said. She looked magnificently furious, though I knew it was at least in part an act. "You want us to hand over millions of dollars in assets for saving a life?"

"From what I hear, the Pacific Northwest Trust's the biggest private landowner in parts of British Columbia too. Isn't that enough?" Jacob said, even as he inched away from Rosalie. "The land I want is ours anyway."

"That may well be for some of that land," Esme said. "But the pressure on you to exploit it, once it becomes known that you control it, will be immense. And the taxes –"

I tuned out the conversation as Jacob and various Cullens talked about fee property versus trust property, about reversions and about accounts that would be replenished as long as land remained wild, because the important thing had already been settled: I would change, and the Quileute would leave us alone. The tribe would get a swath of forest that they had once controlled for centuries or maybe millennia, and the Cullens would say goodbye to an area they had already decided to leave.

"Shall I carry you home?" Edward asked me softly as the negotiations continued, more or less amicably - depending on Jasper's influence, I thought. "That way Raquel can take your chair, and you have a long journey tomorrow." I looked down at my best friend. Seth was now sitting on the ground, providing a dry ledge for Raquel to perch on.

"Can we leave?" I said, glancing over at Jacob. "Because I'm wiped."

A muscle in Edward's jaw twitched before he called out, "Black!," interrupting an exchange about land along the Sol Duc River. "Are you satisfied?" he asked Jacob with the barest civility. "Are we done enough here so that Bella can get the rest she needs?"

The expression on Jacob's face cycled from business to sympathy. "Yeah," he said. He moved closer to my chair and dropped into a crouch that put him at eye level. "I guess it's all details from here on. And these two" – he pointed at Raquel and Seth – "are going to get off my back now, right?"

Raquel made a sound that was half agreement, half derision.

"They were majorly persistent," Jacob told me. He paused for a moment. "I'm sorry about … all this," he added vaguely, waving in a way to indicate my illness, his wolfiness and Edward's vampirism.

I leaned forward and hugged him briefly around his broad shoulders. "Thanks for talking with us," I said. "I'm glad you came and spoke to my class so that I met you."

His face darkened again. "I guess this is it, yeah?" he said, and rose back up to standing. Raquel sprang up to embrace me and say goodbye. "See you on the other side," she whispered, then eyed Edward. "You better not fuck this up," she told him.

He nodded grimly, probably hearing a lot more from her thoughts. "If I do, I won't be around for you to berate me. Thank you for all your help."

A second later, Edward had swung me into his arms, Jacob still watching me, his pack watching Jacob.

"I'll miss what you were," Jacob called out as we disappeared into the woods.

"This plane is bigger than the last one," I said. It wasn't a profound observation, but it was indisputable. The extra space in the plane held not just really comfortable chairs that straightened out into beds, but also a passel of medical instruments, which I tried to ignore. Apparently it can take a lot of effort to keep a girl alive long enough to kill her.

"So we can make fewer stops for fuel," Edward answered me patiently over the whine of air rushing past our windows.

"And our pilots are different."

"Indeed." He was smiling now.

"How can Esme and Carlisle be flying the plane?" I asked. "I can't believe the charter company allows that."

"Esme, really. And, well, as it turns out," Edward said a little sheepishly, "we own the charter company."

We were heading to Laconia via Yuma, starting from the same tiny airport that launched our San Francisco trip, all those healthy months ago. Or maybe not healthy, I thought as I stretched out on one of those comfy chairs - maybe even then there was a little seed of cancer just starting its own journey.

It was a long flight, even with the bigger plane, and the sun was starting to set when we landed. As we rolled along the taxiway at Yuma International, from the windows I could see fighter jets from the Marine air station taking off. Inside our hangar were two big black Mercedes S.U.V.s, with heavily tinted windows, of course.

Drug-dealer cars, I thought automatically now that I was back in Arizona, a cop's daughter, and that sparked a memory as Edward carried me down the stairs over to the vehicles.

"Was that you last time?" I asked abruptly. "In the meth dealer's S.U.V. watching me run in Laconia at Christmas?"

"Yes," he said, amused again. "You thought I was a drug lord?"

"I told Charlie you were," I said, by now unsurprised that Edward's need to be near me would have brought him even to this sunny, arid landscape. "I hope he didn't spend too much looking for Walter White."

Our pilots headed for the wildlife refuge (hah! Not much of a refuge tonight) north of town, while Edward and I drove past suburban sprawl and circles of river-irrigated fields, mostly fallow now in summer's glare, into desert and to Laconia, through the deserted town plaza to Charlie's little one-story stucco house in its short row of little one-story stucco houses.

Edward put on his medical-resident eyeglasses and then helped me out of the Mercedes. Even with the sun down and the wind blowing, I found that stepping out of the air-conditioned car was like stepping into an oven.

I stared at my childhood home, at the blue light of the TV leaking from the front window.

"Are you ready to make your peace with Charlie?" Edward asked me.

"I don't have time not to be ready," I answered, and he frowned.

It took long enough for me to get up the driveway that the door opened before we got there.

Charlie looked at the way I walked, at the care I took dropping onto the old plaid sofa, at my wan face, and said, "Oh, hell." He immediately seemed to withdraw into himself, and I had flare of anger at this evidence of history repeating before I stilled my reaction. This was what I wanted. Even Charlie shouldn't have to tend to a dying child.

"Dad, this is Alex Shapiro, who I told you about. He's been taking care of me," I said.

"It's an honor, sir," Edward said in the time-tested way of boyfriends meeting fathers, and offered Charlie a hand heated by a pocket warmer.

Charlie might have been an unreliable husband and father, but he wasn't easily intimidated, so he neither flinched nor retreated at contact with a vampire. "Have a seat, Dr. Shapiro," he said gruffly, settling into an armchair opposite me.

"Call me Alex, please," Edward said, pushing the glasses up his nose and unbuttoning his suit jacket as he sat next to me.

Charlie nodded but didn't answer, and turned to me. "Is it the same thing as your mom?" he said.

"It's ovarian instead," I said. "There's no treatment."

Charlie made a noise as if he had been punched in the stomach. "You too," he said faintly.

"And your mother, and Renee's mother, and all their mothers before them," I reminded him. "You remember the research I did."

He ignored that. "How are you feeling?" he asked instead.

"Not so hot," I said, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "Just like Mom."

He didn't flinch from shaking hands with a vampire, but he flinched at that. "Do you have something to take?" he asked.

"I have plenty of pain meds, thanks to –" I tilted my head to indicate Edward. "None of the yelling and screaming at doctors Yolanda had to do for Mom."

Charlie looked down at his hands a moment. "You can stay here, you know," he said after a moment. "I'll tend to you. You don't have to rely on strangers. We can set up everything –"

"I'm not a stranger," Edward interrupted him, resentment in his tone. "I can take care of everything Bella needs."

"And Raquel's up there too," I put in.

"That's a long way away—"

"Charlie," I said. "I have to be in Washington. It's a Death With Dignity state. Arizona isn't."

Charlie took a moment to absorb that, then glared at Edward. "And you're going to be the one to give her this so-called death with dignity?"

"In Washington," I said carefully, "it has to be self-administered. So lay off Alex. I've done the paperwork. I've made my choice." My voice grew harder. "You couldn't stand seeing Mom die, but I had to watch it. I can't go through what Mom went through. And you can't ask me to."

"The hell I can't!" Charlie leapt up from his chair. "I'm your father, and I have the right to tell you not to kill yourself!"

I bit back the words that were my first impulse to say: You gave up the right to demand paternal prerogatives when you abandoned me 20 years ago. Instead, I said, "Fine, you can ask it, but the answer's no." I sighed. "I need to go and see Yolanda before it gets too late."

Charlie seemed inclined to argue more, but as Edward helped me up from the sofa, my father's face changed from angry to stricken, and he was silent as we left the house.

"Gah!" I fumed as we reached the meth S.U.V. I didn't need anything in there, but it was the most private place to talk. I leaned against the hot metal of the passenger door to hold myself up. "I can't believe he has the nerve to complain about this! It's so … selfish."

"It's reasonable for a parent to be selfish about this," Edward said quietly. I looked at him in disbelief, and he added. "And for what it's worth, I think Charlie was making a sincere offer about taking care of you."

That silenced me for a moment. When Charlie had said that, I'd paid it so little mind that I didn't even snort at the ridiculousness of it. Of course my father wouldn't be able to take care of me.

"You think he was making a sincere offer?" I asked after a minute. "You don't know?"

"I can't truly read Charlie's thoughts," Edward said. "I have hints, shapes, but not real images, and only occasional strings of words. His mental voice seems be on a station I can't quite tune into. In contrast to your mind, which seems to be broadcasting on a different radio band altogether."

"Wow," I said at this diverting news. "I wonder what Renee's mind would have been like for you." There was a flash of some emotion – dismay? guilt? – on Edward's face, and the implications slowly came to me.

What if the matrix of genes that destined my cells to go haywire included ones that made my mind impenetrable? What if the same things that made it possible for us to be together were the same ones conspiring to make it impossible for us to stay together?

The universe really knew how to screw people over.

"Oh," I said, "maybe that's inherited too, you think?"

"Carlisle's always thought I inherited my telepathy from my mother, so who knows? Perhaps somehow the combination of Renee's and Charlie's genes shields your mind," Edward said. "And like you, your father's not afraid of me – maybe that's a trait as well."

"At least that's a useful one," I said, "as opposed to being prone to cancer."

"Hardly useful, in Darwinian terms," Edward pointed out. "You should be afraid."

"I'm abnormal in many ways, apparently."

Blocked from the dry wind, my back was sweating against the S.U.V. I shifted and returned to Charlie's offer to care for me. "So, would Charlie have followed through? Would he have run away the moment things got difficult?"

Edward's face grew even more somber. "I can't tell you that. But it's obvious he loves you." He touched my cheek with an almost warm finger. "Who wouldn't?"

I stared at Charlie's front door, and Edward went on, "Speaking of people who love you, Señora Pérez is eager to see you. Her mind is a clear as a windowpane."

Indeed, Yolanda's curtains were twitching at her windows as we made our way to her house. I was greeted with hugs and kisses and clucking about my weight; Edward lingered at the door until I introduced him. Yolanda's brown eyes widened at the sight of him.

"El es más guapo que Fernando Colunga," she whispered to me. I smiled, because Edward was indeed more handsome than that 1990s telenovela star Yolanda used to swoon over in "María la del Barrio." She and I would watch it together sometimes with Renee.

"Yolanda, this is Dr. Alex Shapiro," I said in the same language she used. "And his Spanish is excellent." As was his mind-reading, but I had to accept that I couldn't tell her that.

Edward stepped forward, and I could almost hear Yolanda's heartbeat start racing. Her hand was suddenly gripping mine painfully, and I was reminded of Raquel's discomfort at being enclosed in a car with vampires..

"Señora Pérez, Bella's told me so much about you," Edward said in his suave Peninsular Spanish. "I cannot express how grateful I am that you took such good care of her when her parents couldn't." Yolanda's hand softened its grasp on me at his words. "I would like so much to talk with you, but unfortunately, I just got a text from my hospital I need to attend to. Would you excuse me?"

"Por supuesto," Yolanda said with obvious relief. A little bow for Yolanda, a quick kiss for me, then Edward was gone and I was being led to the heart of Yolanda's house, the kitchen, with its familiar smells of cooking. Without asking, she put a plate of flour tortillas and a bowl of soup – my visit, for her, was a special occasion deserving of posole - on the table in front of me.

"You can't get better if you don't eat," she said, sitting next to me.

"I'm sure it's delicious," I said as gently as I could, "but I'm not going to get any better."

"Eat it anyway," she said in her abuela voice, but then she burst into tears. I held her as she sobbed for several minutes, as she talked of the candles she had lighted to protect me from this fate, but God wanted to gather me to his angels, and I cried, too, hating my deception, hating the knowledge that if she ever encountered me in my new form she would recoil as she had with Edward.

Like Charlie, she wanted me to come home so she could take care of me, but I told her that Dr. Alex had arranged everything while I omitted mention of fatal self-administered doses, at which she would also recoil.

"I have something to ask you," I said when our tears had ebbed.

"Of course."

"I'm going to leave you something so you can keep feeding Charlie until you don't want to do it anymore, but I want you to promise that you'll use the other part of the money I'm giving you for yourself." She tried to interrupt me but I wagged a finger at her. "For yourself, not for your kids or your grandkids or the church."

"That money should go to Charlie," she objected.

"It's Renee's insurance money, and she wouldn't want it to go to him," I said, and waited until Yolanda nodded reluctantly in acknowledgment. "It's a trust she set up to go to me on my next birthday so I could pay for grad school. Happily, I don't have an unlucky daughter to leave it to."

Yolanda pursed her lips. "Children are always blessings."

"Not in my case. Or Charlie's either."

She was silent for a moment, and I ate a spoonful of posole to appease her, before she spoke again. "You really are a blessing for Charlie, even if he didn't always act if he saw it that way. Forgive him before you go back to Seattle."

"It's hard. I used to believe that I understood him, that he was being the usual weak guy with a sick wife, but …" I thought of Edward's intense devotion to me these past weeks, and, yes, it wasn't fair to compare a human male with a supernatural creature with a supernatural love, but it let me see possibilities of a stronger commitment than Charlie had shown to the woman he'd pledged himself to, than he had to the child he was bound to look after. "But the truth is that I don't. How can I forgive him when I don't understand him?"

There were further tears, and a carefully fabricated account about how I'd met my gorgeous doctor, before Edward returned from his imaginary emergency texting duties. I even managed to finish my bowl of posole.

He and Yolanda had a short, awkward conversation and a courteous exchanges of nods. Then there were hugs for me before Edward steered me back to Charlie's house for a final night in my childhood bedroom. Wrung out – by traveling, by Yolanda, by Charlie, by Charlie's genes - I dropped into an uneasy sleep.

That sleep was interrupted by discomfort, not the usual pain, but a need to pee. Edward wasn't there, and I quietly got up to head to the bathroom. I heard voices from the kitchen as I opened my bedroom door.

"I'm not your doctor, of course," Edward was saying, "but considering your family history, you should think about getting a PSA test long before you're 50 so –" He stopped abruptly. He had heard or smelled me.

"What?" Charlie asked.

"Stay," I whispered. "I'm fine."

"I thought I heard Bella, but false alarm, I suppose," Edward said.

"Has Bella talked to you about me?" Charlie said. "I know she's bitter –"

"Considering what you've done," Edward interrupted him, "she's been remarkably measured. I'm more irate about your sins than she is."

I heard a muffled thump, a fist on the kitchen table. "How do you dare to come in my home and criticize me?" Charlie said.

"Perhaps it's not polite, but this is the only chance I'll have to get this off my chest, and even then, I doubt it'll work. Do you know where I was six years ago, Charlie?" I imagined Charlie shaking his head as I sat in the armchair in the living room out of sight of the kitchen, my bladder forgotten. "New Hampshire. Dartmouth. The college you prevented Bella from attending. Five more years I could have had with her –"

"You don't know that –"

"I do," Edward said with such firmness that Charlie must have decided against arguing the point.

"Well, it gave me five extra years, having her in Tucson, years when she could come home for holidays, I could drive there and see her on weekends. I got her that Civic ... I would have never seen her if she'd been all the way on the East Coast. Dartmouth wasn't going to give her plane fare."

I had to shake my head ruefully because in that scenario I would have been flying Cullen Air anytime I'd wanted, apparently.

"So given what's happened," Charlie continued, "I can't feel bad that I made it possible to see my daughter more."

"You would have seen her more if you hadn't skipped town on her mother."

There were several beats before Charlie said, "Bella's never forgiven me for that."

"Have you ever truly apologized to her?"

A heavy sigh. "I've tried, but … the words. They get stopped up in my throat. I look at Bella, I see so much of Renee. And my own mother."

"You could try saying it to me," Edward suggested softly, in that persuasive voice I'd forbidden him to use on me.

The silence that followed seemed to reverberate in my chest. What could Charlie say that would justify what he had done?

"When the doctor told us that Renee was sick," Charlie started, "I was … well, all I could think about was my mother, when she got sick. Bella doesn't realize – I do know what Renee went through, because I saw it, the pain at least, with my mama.

"I was the same age Bella was for Renee, too little to really understand what was going on. My father tried to keep it a secret from me – you're too young to know this, but not that long ago, people were ashamed of getting cancer, they tried to hide it—"

"That's something that's discussed in medical school, as history," Edward said, not lying.

"Yeah, but all I knew was that Mama had a sickness we couldn't talk about, and that my father – my father grew angry and old right before my eyes. He lost his temper constantly, he was going into debt. When Mama was groaning in pain, it twisted him up inside. She had cervical cancer and he blamed me, told me that if I hadn't been born, this wouldn't have happened."

"That's not true, of course." Edward's voice was deep and soothing.

"What did I know? I was 5. I believed it. And when my father … he came close to hitting me a couple of times, I think – he couldn't be angry at Mama, but he could at me, at least that's what Father Herrera says. He certainly screamed at me, and I believed what he said, at the time at least."

There was another silence that lasted for several moments. "So when Renee got sick, I – I didn't panic, exactly, but I had to look at myself. What kind of father was I going to be to Bella? I have a temper, you've seen it. Was I going to yell at her, blame her while Renee was groaning in the other room? Or was it better to hurt her in some other way? As the doctor talked about all the treatments and the decisions and the percentages, it was like a giant rock getting lowered on me, knocking my breath out. My mother died on me, my wife was dying on me, and now my daughter -" Charlie's voice broke and he inhaled sharply. "And so I took off.

"You can say I was a coward, and I won't disagree with you. And I know Bella hates me for it. But at least I never hit her or screamed at her or told her it was her fault her mother died." He laughed a humorless laugh. "You can put that on my gravestone: 'He never hit his kid.' She just hates me for disappearing. I'm sorry I did it, but I'm still not sure that wasn't the best thing to do."

"Bella doesn't hate you," Edward said, and I touched my cheek to feel the wetness there. Edward was right: I didn't hate Charlie, I was disappointed in him. And maybe he did do the right thing in the circumstances, maybe I had been better off without him there. Or maybe all the alternatives were equally shitty.

"Try to apologize one last time," Edward said before adding, "I think I really do hear Bella this time."

He had me scooped up before Charlie was able to scrape his chair back and make it to the doorway of the kitchen. I watched from the shelter of Edward's arms as my father approached, a man uncertain of his reception.

"Oh, Dad," I was able to whisper before a sob burst out of my throat. It was the first time I'd called him that in 19 years.

We ended that night on the best terms that we could have managed, I thought. I didn't approve of what he had done, but I had a better understanding of his motives. Telling him that seemed to remove a weight on my chest that I didn't even know that I had been carrying – maybe it was the same weight that Charlie had felt in that doctor's office all those years ago.

And Charlie didn't approve of what I was doing, but he seemed to accept it, thanks to Dr. Alex's supernatural bedside manner. Like Charlie with Renee, what I had was a couple of shitty alternatives.

The difference was that I had one much better alternative that he didn't know about. I was even able to thank him for all that he had done for me – after all, my life had unfolded in a way so that I ended up with Edward.

We left very early the next day, to give us time to make it to the hangar in Yuma before sunrise. Esme and Carlisle, bright-eyed from hunting - "Bobcat and mountain lion, a good night," Esme said cheerfully, "and all the poisonous snakes of course don't bother us" - were already there. Carlisle regarded me gravely, always assessing; no cancer patient ever had such an attentive doctor. He even shined a light in my eyes. "Just checking," he said.

"Are you ready?" he asked me afterward.

To fly, or to die? I wondered, but I simply said, "I'm all set."

"It's good we're headed to Alaska," he muttered. The second, then.

I stretched out on one of the chair beds, and Esme got us safely out of Yuma. Edward and I were chatting about Yolanda and Charlie and the possibility of vampires living in the desert when my old friend breakthrough pain flared up, punishing something deep inside me.

It was so severe that I barely felt the prick of the needle, and instead of the usual blessed relief, the pain continued. I curled into a ball and groaned, and Edward called urgently for Carlisle.

"It's not working," I heard Edward say from far away.

"Bella's liver is failing," Carlisle said from another vast distance. "You can see it in her eyes. When she has a seizure - "

"Make it stop," I whimpered.

"Hold on, Bella, here's more," Carlisle said, and there was another pinprick, then another. "Edward, now."

There was a groan that didn't come from me, and cool lips on my neck, and then the precipice.

I fell for a very long time, and all I could do was pray faster that it would be over soon.

Chapter title: Entre le royaume des vivants et les morts: "Between the kingdom of the living and the kingdom of the dead," from "Reflektor," by Arcade Fire.

Many of you guessed the identity of the mystery vamp; I hope you forgive my weasel words on the last chapters, but indeed, they had never met.

As I've said before, I'm writing about an experience here that's different for everyone, something that's been driven home to me as I've been working on this story. Two people close to me have been diagnosed with cancer in that time; because we live in NYC, they're part of immunotherapy trials, a treatment that may prove to be a magic bullet for cancer, or may turn out to be as hit-or-miss as the remedies of previous generations. (Siddhartha Mukherjee's excellent "Emperor of All Maladies" details the depressing history of cancer treatments, including the very slow recognition that cancers are not all alike.) Bella's cancer progresses quickly here, though perhaps not as quickly as that of Lemmy of Motorhead, who also died while I've been writing this story: diagnosed on Saturday, dead on Monday.

Thanks for reading and reviewing!