[Edit: 7 Sept 2021]

Trapped as I am – not trapped, no, because I am a guest here, I could leave at any point – I bide my time doing the only thing I can, watching the vampires. They're ethereally beautiful and gracefully, something which weeks ago might have made me curl my lips. Undead. Blood-suckers. Monsters. Except not. I don't doubt for a second that if this coven is good, then they are the exception to the rule – vampires are bad, why would the shifters exist otherwise? They ply me with conversation, even if I don't engage, their words clear and thick as honey. Their smiles and winks and laughter make them seem human, but the way they do it is so obviously not that it makes me dizzy.

Beauty is just beauty and will hide evil just as well as shadows and lies.

I'm not ready for it though. Not for forgiveness or acceptance. Not for them, not for Sam, not for myself – but I feel like I am allowed this now, a chance. My bitterness is still bitterness, but it is warranted bitterness, something I acknowledge and am actively aware of.

Even so, companionship is freely offered. Less freely accepted, but this is my life, I will take it as slow as necessary.

Despite their best efforts at being welcoming, and their seemingly genuine desire not to harm or exclude me, the subtle stiffening of shoulders, the hardness in their smiles, the way they wrinkled their noses ever so slightly when I was in the room, it's obvious that they are just as discomfited as I am.

We are natural enemies. There are shelves dedicated to our struggle, enough stories to indoctrinate a nation. I fed on the tales of our battles, a child enraptured by fireflies and the spark of the spit in the darkness. The voices of my elders were mesmeric as I listened and believed.

I understand this.

I have been on the giving and receiving ends of this impasse many times before. I still am. I cannot fault them for their discomfort while I cringe back from their casual touches and their somewhat pleasant countenance.

In truth, I'm an outsider here. Just as I had been an outsider in the pack. None of them would admit to this, of course, they're all too sensitive to the workings of loneliness and abandonment. So perhaps I should fit in, but I don't. They know it, I know it – we're all just too jagged from old scars to say it aloud.

At one point in my life I'd been the girl that was too tall for the length of my arms. Too loud. Too stubborn. Too enraptured by my relationship to see it crumbling. And so, I was the only woman in a male pack. The only female shifter - too bitter, too annoying, too rapped in the past. I am and have been many things. It's not too much of a stretch now to label myself as the monster between nightmares.

And somehow, knowing that they do not want me; that the darkness of our lives does not merge, but rather collides – I am happy. Not truly happy, mind, but happier among these creatures I professed to hate than among the pack that was meant to be my family.

Perhaps now, separate from them as I am, I can allow myself the luxury of dropping the pretence that I care about the pack's functionality or growth. At first the pack existed for me because Sam was the centre of it, then because I was part of it. If I am not in it then I am alone in my new state of existence. But then I lost Sam and I was lonely even within the thick of 'pack' (inside jokes turned truly inside), yet I stayed because no one else could understand, there was nowhere else I could try to belong. That is until Seth was pack, too. Seth, like the lifeblood in my veins, is necessary for existence.

This new freedom is a second – third? Fourth? – chance. It's now or never to rid myself of my chains.

I cast my eyes around the pristine room the vampires affectionately call 'the communal'. Like everything else, it's all sleek lines and sharp precision. Cool, clear, and clean, mustered in pale blue and white, dominated by towering window-walls. The baby grand Renesme had shown me now sits in one corner, behind the utilitarian white couches. It's a sore thumb in the uniform room.

A crackling record player croons some jazz in the corner of the room. Earlier, Jasper had been sitting with his eyes closed as he listened, the closest thing to a smile teasing his lips. Alice, either aware and unbothered, or ignorant of his smile, hummed along as she wove wool into the beginnings of a scarf.

The vampires, I've noticed, exist in pairs. They are present only in shadows clinging to their masters. It was mostly creepy, but also sweet. It makes me think of wolves and their mates, a desperate bond existing between two separate entities, co-dependent. I can't say that I'm jealous, not when I am (trying) to revel in this new freedom. But I cannot deny how it stirs something desperate and pleading within my own chest. A craving. To have someone who cares for you, who wants to be with you always and forever – it's a wet feeling, knowing that I don't have this, that I might never.

Because it is love that I see in Alice's eyes, encouragement in Edward's, teasing affection in Emmett's. There is no denying that these creatures hold a bond stronger than time or death. It's nauseating in its simplicity.

Unfortunately, their familiarity and affection only bring to light the errors of the pack. If this is what family is, if this is what caring for someone and wanting the best for them looks like, then I have been grossly dealt a failing hand.

The pack is a bunch of hoodlums crashing through broken windows in comparison. Sam is their unqualified leader and, somehow, illogically, it still breaks my heart to know I am not with them.