fifty-three.

(Jacob)

Life post-Newborns is strange—if that can be reasonably translated to painfully boring. Despite his laundry list of ailments (twelve fractured ribs, a broken arm, dislocated shoulder, bleeding on his spleen—not that he knows what it does, anyway—and deep tissue bruising), Jacob had thought that Dr Fang's strict bed rest requirement was excessive, but Leah's reaction once she finds out that he has not been complying is an entirely different ball game. He doesn't remember what she was like right after the accident; his memories start somewhere on Day Two, and even then they are hazy around the edges. In the end, it doesn't matter. The extensive recap Quil provides could rival the efforts of any historian, though Jacob didn't need all of the details—

("Kim didn't say anything for, like, four hours! I didn't know she could do that," Quil had recounted, an almost maniacal gleam in his eye. "And then Jared did the whole please, I'll make it up to you spiel, and before you knew it, right there in Emily's living room, they—")

—but, at the very least, he can still appreciate his best friend's consistency in needing to know everybody's business.

Leah, on the other hand, has become unexpectedly focused on getting back to normal—as if such a thing can be achieved in their world—and has been collecting community college brochures and job applications and newspaper clippings with an almost obsessive zeal.

"She's like you," Embry remarks off-handedly on Day Five. He has not long since survived his own near-brush with death, during which Leah, quite literally, chased him around the reservation with nothing but her dad's old baseball bat and a few creative death threats. "She always needs a crusade."

Jacob's hands pause over his toolbox. He stares at Embry—who has boldly taken up residence in the hammock (in his hammock, although Leah would argue otherwise and state that it is hers by right of conquest)—and he wonders where the baseball bat is now.

"A campaign," Embry quickly amends, obviously acutely aware of his impending peril, though Jacob can't understand how that wording is any better. "Oh, don't look at me like that, you know what I mean—something to do; a battle plan. This is the girl who spent a year dedicating her life to running Sam and Emily's names into the dirt, after all. And you—you spent a year chasing the leech lover and trying to keep her alive."

(Under no circumstances are they allowed to say That Name, even if Leah is not around to hear it.)

Embry apparently chooses to ignore how close he is to earning a few bruises, blithely continuing on. He swings back and forth in the hammock, seemingly without a care in the world.

"Then it was all about graduation, then the newborns. Now it's about trying to move on. And she won't leave the Rez—not without you, anyway," he says.

Jacob is not mollified—if anything, his frown deepens, the reminder that he has irrevocably changed Leah's life stinging like dragging a blade over a wound he thought had healed. He still can't tell whether Leah's insistence about not going to a college out of state is because of him and the idea of leaving him behind, or simply because she doesn't want to—or something else. He is too afraid to ask, nor does he trust his brain to generate an alternate explanation.

"So she's doing the next best thing," Embry waffles on. "She just gets a bit of tunnel vision sometimes, is all."

"Have I ever told you that I liked you better before you became my girlfriend's biggest fan?"

"She's better looking than you are."

Jacob grumbles, trying and failing to not over-tighten a bolt that is currently single-handedly holding up his engine bracket. "You're supposed to be on my side, here. I saved your life; you owe me."

"You're not in our club, sorry." Embry jumps down from the hammock, his grin the complete opposite of anything remotely apologetic. "Besides, Dead Parents and Absent Siblings Anonymous just doesn't have the same ring to it."

Jacob puts down his spanner before snapping his toolbox shut with a decisive click. He has sworn off casual violence, swears that his control extends as far as he'd like it to, and it's given him plenty to prove.

Plenty to keep his mind occupied.

"Embry," he says evenly, feeling the beginnings of a headache fluttering around the edges of his vision. "Your mother is alive and well at some bar within a twenty-mile radius, and I'll bet you five bucks Dad's yelling at the TV again. If you're allowed in, I'm allowed in. Fair's fair. Plus, my mom's dead. That should be an automatic in."

"Fine. We'll rename it to Traumatised Older Siblings. Next time Rachel calls, feel free to ask if she has any lasting psychological trauma from parenting you."

Embry darts out of the garage before the spanner can be thrown at his head, laughing because he knows Jacob is too scared to ignore Doctor Fang's strict ban on phasing before the week is out—a ban that Leah has charged herself with enforcing, in addition to her million other responsibilities. Honestly, after everything Quil (and Paul) has shared with him about That Day, it's a miracle that Leah has allowed him to go as far as the garage, and a damn wonder that she even allows him out of her sight at all.

Next week, Jacob thinks, his side twinging a little as he turns back to resume his tinkering. I'll get him back next week.

According to MapQuest, it takes eight hours to drive to Washington State University. Fourteen hours and fifty dollars on a Greyhound. One hour to fly from Sea-Tac to Pullman.

(In comparison, it takes 6 hours to fly from Sea-Tac to Honolulu, Hawaii.)

(Jacob knows; he's checked. Several times.)

It takes one second to pick up the phone.

And yet, somehow, it takes seven days to learn that Rachel has earned her degree—it turns out that whilst he was fighting for his life, she was graduating early, the absolute nerd—and she is moving back to La Push, and that's only because she's standing in his living room with a weird look on her face that, as a kid, always meant she was going to throw up.

(Her sudden reappearance shouldn't come as a surprise, really. It took two days before they learned Rebecca eloped and became Mrs Solomon Finau, and Jacob has never even met the dude. Total unpredictability seems to be the twins' modus operandi.)

Rachel looks like a deer caught in the headlights, already planning her next escape; if Jacob didn't have a track record of beating her in foot races, he might have something to worry about.

Realistically, Rachel escaping probably wouldn't take long. She still has her suitcase in hand, a rucksack on her back. All she'd have to do is turn around and walk straight back out of the door again—something Jacob thinks his sister will not find too difficult, considering how quickly she ditched them all the first time round.

"You're back," he says dumbly.

Rachel looks at him with equal confusion, brows disappearing further and further into her hairline with every passing second. And, sure, she has bangs now, so it doesn't take too long for her expression to be the perfect picture of surprise, but the whole thing is still weird.

"You're . . . big," she says, looking mildly disgusted. "Are you on drugs?"

Jacob throws his arms up, exasperated in a way that only a sibling can trigger. (He is pleased to note, however, that his bones give zero protest—a marked improvement, and one he will be sure to share with Leah in hope she will loosen his leash.) "Why does everybody say that?"

"Have you looked in the mirror lately?" Rachel demands, waving a hand in his general direction. "People don't just look like . . . that. We don't have those kind of genes!"

"You kids want some coffee?" Billy asks innocently, his wheelchair squeaking as he emerges from the kitchen.

Rachel gives Jacob another look. "I'm going to put my stuff in my room. I'll be here for a while."

Jacob and his father look at each other, their expressions undoubtedly a match vision of bewilderment. His older sister materialising before the morning paper has even been thrown into the dew-streaked grass was certainly not high on his list of possibilities and, yet, here she is.

"Hey!" Rachel calls from down the hallway. "What's with all the fishing gear on my bed?"

"Welcome back, sand shrimp!" Jacob bellows in reply, ignoring his dad's reproachful harrumph.

Billy busies himself with making three cups of coffee. He heaps mounds of sugar into Rachel's just as she liked in high school, though whether she even drinks coffee these days is a blind guess—Jacob can count the list of things he's sure of on one hand, and one of those sure things is his sister's name—but they need something to work with.

Even if it takes the form of a liquid glucose overdose.

"Didn't you say Leah was coming over today?" Billy says suddenly, eyes darting to the wall clock. "Maybe she'd appreciate a heads up."

Jacob dials her home line by muscle memory, pressing the numbers as quickly as his fingers can move. Maybe, if he is especially lucky, Leah will still be at home; she could still be sleeping, resting after the long weeks of gruelling stress.

"Clearwater residence," Seth says cheerily.

"Hey Seth, it's an emergency, is Leah there?" he says, stretching the phone cable to peer out the living room window.

So far, so good.

"Already left," Seth replies, some of the lightness draining from his tone. "Is everything okay?"

"Uh, yes, but also no. See, I woke up this morning and Rachel was here—"

Jacob will have to blame it on his weakened state; he hears Leah's footsteps only seconds before the screen door clatters shut, trapping him inside with his clearly disgruntled girlfriend. She folds her arms across her chest, levelling him with the sort of look that could bring a weaker man (read: Embry) to tears. She's had plenty to be angry about lately, more excuses than he can shake a stick at, but her disappointment stings more than the rubbing alcohol Carlisle's given him for his wounds.

"I've known for all of ten minutes," he says quietly as he slowly puts the phone down, almost pleading, because she has a million reasons to hate him but this isn't one. "I don't know what her deal is. Just talk to her, please."

She has hardly a moment to think about it before Rachel rounds the corner, clutching a dusty box. "Hey, Dad, I thought you'd want—"

A single blink is the only indication Leah gives that she is surprised by this turn of events. It takes only a second more before her cool mask snaps into place, and Jacob knows that his day—his life—is only going to get infinitely more difficult from here on out. Even a blind man would be able to see the quiet storm brewing in Leah's eyes, a torrent of bitter betrayal and anger that could easily level the Reservation.

To her credit, Rachel does not cower. "Hi, Leah."

The tilt of Leah's head is almost imperceptible: a predator considering its prey; a sure sign of danger. "Are you lost?"

Jacob tenses, ready to leap between his sister and his imprint before blood can be shed—or rather, before any more blood can be shed. Rachel and Rebecca don't know about his brush with death, and his life would be considerably easier if it was kept it that way.

Then again, these days, his sisters don't know much of anything that happens on the Rez. They don't text, they hardly call, they never visit; before now, Jacob cannot remember the last time he spoke to either of them, and he doubts his father can recall a recent conversation that's lasted longer than five minutes.

It's not that Jacob blames them for leaving, not really—they'd spent years fantasising about ways to get off the Reservation even before their mother died. But he blames them for leaving him behind, for barely sparing him a thought—let alone a glance over their shoulders—when they left for their new lives. What hurts is that they had moved beyond fantasies; there was A Plan, one that specifically did not include him. His sisters had quietly pooled together their savings and the tiny inheritance from their mother, granted to them at the age of eighteen, and they'd booked themselves an all-out trip to Hawaii the second they had graduated high school—and, somehow, he didn't figure into any of their calculations.

And then, worse: Rebecca had gotten married, and she didn't come home. A month later, Rachel left for college, and she didn't come home either. Not even for birthdays or anniversaries or holidays or . . . funerals.

Jacob looks at Leah and thinks that, even if an alternate reality existed in which he did not feel so inclined to fall down at her feet and give her whatever she wants, to follow her wherever she might go, he still would not blame her for feeling so betrayed when Harry died and the twins didn't show up. Because he understands that kind of betrayal; Rachel and Rebecca are his sisters, for God's sake, and they haven't shown up for him, either, not once in all the years they have been gone. The fact that Rachel can stand there and expect a warm welcome is just another nail in the coffin.

"I don't want to interrupt you girls," Billy says lightly, "but I see you've found my lures. Jacob, take them from your sister."

Jacob throws his father a side-long glance. Fishing? At a time like this?

Still, he'd give what's remaining of his spleen to be extricated from the stare-down (he loves Leah, and Rachel is blood, but there's a certain portion of himself that is wholly dedicated to self-preservation) so he takes the tacklebox, carting it into the safety of the garage.

He only counts to fifteen before he returns. He's conflict-avoidant, not stupid, and leaving the two of them alone without a court-appointed mediator is a recipe for disaster. Expecting the worst has become a typical part of his routine. Even so, there's a tiny hopeful part of him that wills things to go back to how they were, a time when Leah slotted in neatly as a bonus twin.

But fifteen seconds is all it takes.

He flies through the door, barely winded, prepared to play piggy-in-the-middle if it means he will be able to pull Leah away from Rachel that much faster; his girlfriend is one more punch away from being arrested for affray, and the only thing working in his favour is that he doesn't believe Charlie would have the courage to read Leah her rights, let alone put her in handcuffs.

As it happens, Leah's not the one he needs to be worried about.

"—my baby brother! How could you!" Rachel is screaming. "You . . . You! And him! It's disgusting—it's wrong! He's still in high school!"

Rather uncharacteristically, Leah is quiet. Having taken up residence in his dad's armchair, she leans back, legs crossed, exuding an air of nonchalance as she idly picks at her nails. Rachel is threatening to bring the roof down and Leah is just . . . sitting there, taking it, because she knows that, really, she has won.

Won what exactly, Jacob doesn't know. Must be a girl thing. Excluding the fact that Rachel reappeared in their lives less than half an hour ago, he wasn't even aware this was a battle he and Leah were planning to fight.

(Not yet, anyway. He'd kind of been hoping that Rachel would have fled the Rez again before learning of their relationship.)

Billy rolls forward, quite rightly looking petrified. If he has learned anything from raising three children, it is that he is an even worse referee than those in the MLB, and that is without counting the few strategies he had learned being lost to the passage of time. "Now, Rachel—"

"How long!" she demands, voice shrill as she whirls on their father. "How long have you been letting—this—" Rachel gestures wildly between Jacob, who's still frozen in the doorway, and Leah, who is now wearing her famous shit-eating grin "—go on?! I've been gone for all of five minutes—"

"Two years," Leah interjects, not even deigning to lift her gaze away from her fingernails. "I realise time flies when you're having fun, and all, but there's a lot you've missed. I don't know what you expected after you decided to leave us, but our lives didn't exactly stop in your absence."

"No. Instead you moved in on my brother—my younger brother—and not one of you thought to tell me—"

"And how would I have done that?" Leah looks up, then, pinning Rachel with a flat stare that has been known to cut deeper than any knife. "You changed your cell phone number."

Rachel frowns. "No I didn't."

"Oh." Leah feigns confusion of her own, and Jacob instinctively inches towards the armchair. "So why didn't you answer any of my calls or texts?"

"I was busy—"

"Too busy to come to my dad's funeral? My graduation? I sent you an invitation—or did your address change, too?"

Rachel blinks hard. "It's . . . complicated. I thought you would understand that."

"Then I'm sure you'll understand that things are different now. Not that you're owed any explanation, but I love your brother," Leah declares. "You returning doesn't change that."

A long moment passes, a heated stare between his sister and girlfriend, and Jacob realises Leah's play only heartbeats before a different kind of disaster occurs—

"Besides," Leah says then, cocking her head, "you always said you wanted us to be sisters. Now's your chance."

Rachel shrieks.

The sound is just as ear-piercing as it was when she was ten. She's fast, but Leah is faster, launching herself off the armchair and through the screen door before Rachel can get herself within clawing distance. That doesn't stop Rachel from pursuing her, spilling a litany of inventive threats—promises, perhaps, depending on whether Rachel has kept to her high school track habits—that Jacob can hear through the closed kitchen window.

He sighs, but remains where he is. Barring a seismic shift, the girls will be fine; he remembers his dad and Harry once explaining to him and Seth that the older girls fought because they cared, so perhaps a few well-aimed punches are all that is needed to return them to equilibrium. Regardless, Jacob is not worried — Leah is quite capable of holding her own, and he is positive that the pack (more specifically, Embry and Paul) are a little more than a couple of miles away, ready to jump in should it turn into a bloodbath and they need to save Leah before she can plead guilty to a murder charge.

Billy scoots closer to the door, trying to catch a glimpse of the pair through the dusty glass. "Charlie told me all about Leah's right hook—Bella's going to have to walk down the aisle with a crooked nose, and that's after the doctor tried to fix it."

Jacob snorts. "She'll only have to live with it for a few more weeks."

His father's lips press into a thin line, no doubt as he thinks of the additional vampire that will soon be on the opposite side of the treaty line. "Regardless, I think I'll break it up in a few minutes. Rachel's nose won't be so easily fixed."

"Good luck with that," Jacob says. "Leah might be above punching you, Dad, but don't expect her to listen. Or Rach. What are you gonna do, anyway? Roll over their toes?"

His dad doesn't laugh. He stares out into the yard, a strange expression on his face. "I know that you're angry with Rachel. Rebecca, too." He sighs. "I was, once, but try and see things from their perspective. Things were never easy for them here, not after your mother—"

"Don't," Jacob says quietly, turning away. "Don't make excuses for them."

"It's not that simple, Jake—"

"Yes, it is!" he argues, his hands fisting around nothing. "I don't care that it was hard for them! It was hard for me too, but you don't see me running away—I've been here, doing all the crap that they walked out on and more, and you're still on their side. Rach and Beck turned their backs on us, and you're turning the other cheek. Forgive me if I'm not jumping for joy."

Billy grimaces. "It was never about you, Jacob. If you want someone to point the finger at, blame me."

"Thanks for your permission, I guess," he says wryly. He has a feeling that no matter how much he argues this, he isn't going to win. Not this battle, and not anytime soon.

Potentially never.

"Jake—"

"I should go," he mutters. "Make sure they're not causing a public disturbance, or something."

He doesn't receive an answer, but he hears the sigh, feels the eyes on his back as he lopes down the wooden steps into the yard, and thinks he'd rather deal with his sister than spend any more time trying to shove his father off that damned fence he's sitting on.

Leah emerges victorious, as he knew she would.

Whilst Rachel has attempted to hide her rapidly developing black eye, suddenly resembling her thirteen-year-old self who decided to try her hand at cutting misshapen sweeping bangs (it took months to grow out, and they all suffered for it), Leah wears the single scratch that her newly declared sister-in-law managed to gouge into her cheek like a medal of honour.

She studies her altered appearance in the bathroom mirror, turning her head this way and that as if she is proud of her battle wound—or, if Jacob knows her as well as he thinks he does, to gauge her best side, likely so she can present herself in a way that will earn the most dramatic reactions from his brothers. Normal people might worry how long it will take to heal, or whether it will scar, but not Leah. If anything, she's probably looking forward to the pack's next betting pool being started: five on her milking it for as long as possible, ten on goading Rachel into giving her a matching line on her other cheek.

(Jacob has fifteen on both.)

He watches her with muted interest from the bathtub, where the rigid porcelain lip cuts into the still-healing flesh of his hamstrings. There is plenty that he has come to know about her over the preceding months: the things that make her antsy, how her level of belligerence directly correlates with her level of stress, because anger is the way she shows she cares, but—

Her hurt remains a mystery to him.

The very little he knows about her relationship with Sam has come from the man himself, and even then, he's only gleaned a vague skeleton of what transpired. Leah's unspoken need-to-know policy leaves little room for questions, like whether she misses how things were, or whether she wakes in the middle of the night wishing the warm arm on her waist belonged to someone else.

Comparatively, asking about Rachel is considerably easier.

"Are we going to have to keep you two separated?" he asks, watching the corner of her mouth twitch, almost as if she's fighting back a smirk. "That could make things complicated."

"We've worked out an agreement," Leah says lightly, tracing the edge of her index fingernail along the mark. "She doesn't comment on us, and I don't call her a deadbeat. I think that's fair."

His forehead wrinkles. "Really? That easy?"

Leah shrugs. "She's going to be here all summer. That'd be a lot of fighting."

It takes a moment for her words to sink in.

"All summer?" Jacob repeats in disbelief. "She's— she hasn't— why—"

Leah laughs, placing a firm hand over his shoulder. "Yeah. I know. We'll survive it."

He's about to say something cheesy about all they've survived, but a sudden crash from the living room saves him from death by ruthless teasing."

"Damn it, Meche!" Billy calls, followed by a thump that is almost undoubtedly the battered TV remote reaching new heights. "Top tier my ass."

"Does he ever stop watching baseball?" Rachel asks from the hallway, clutching a couple of rusted-over fishing rods. "The stress can't be good for his heart."

"You want to try telling him that?" Jacob retorts, picturing the chaos that would ensue should Billy be cut off from his lifeline. "'Sides, it keeps him busy. Gives him less time to be nosy."

Leah works quietly in the background as he trades retorts with Rachel, gently working the itchy fabric of his sling between his arm and chest, fighting with the clasps until it hoists his arm securely against his ribs. It's not that he needs it—Carlisle said it wasn't essential, just preferred—but there's not a chance in hell that Leah will allow him to go more than five minutes without the stupid thing constricting him like a shackle. Between that and the crutch that he has to pretend to need when he leaves the confines of the house, he finds himself counting the days until he can conceivably be 'recovered', supposed motorcycle accident be damned. According to Embry, who visited the library specifically to look up broken bone protocols, he needs to pretend to suffer through an entire six weeks of pretending to be crippled. He'd tried stretching his leash once, hobbling to check the mailbox at the end of the driveway, and by the time he had returned, Sue Clearwater was already on her way over to read him the riot act, talking about infections and deformities and blood clots as Leah stood behind his shoulder, mouth set in a firm line.

He'll just have to endure it.

It's a little weird how just a little conversation with Leah, a couple of needling questions, gets Rachel talking a mile a minute, doing the weird dramatic hand movements that haven't changed a smidgen since he last saw her. Her fingers curl and spread, hands waving with the lilt of the conversation, balling into fists as she tells some story about an ex-boyfriend. Jacob pretends to tidy the bathroom as they talk, trying to blend into the background as they begin to patch over something he never realised was so fragile. For as much as things have changed, there is plenty that has remained the same, tenous links between his old life and the world he now inhabits.

There's a bang, then, a little softer than Billy's baseball-induced tantrum, and it takes Jacob a moment to realise the additonal heartbeat, the footsteps on linoleum.

Charlie.

"We can just pretend you're not here," Jacob says, giving Leah one of those looks that he hopes translates to please take it easy. "Dad won't say anything."

As if summoned, Billy bellows to them from the living room, calling "kids! Get out here!" in a tone that leaves no room for disagreement.

"Why are we hiding?" Rachel whispers when Jacob sighs, leading the way. "What did you do?"

"I broke Bella's nose," Leah says plainly. "Deeply satisfying."

"Awesome," Rachel breathes, even though she has absolutely no reason to wish bodily harm on Bella.

He thinks.

Unsurprisingly, Charlie appears unimpressed by Leah's appearance, but at the least, he has the wisdom not to comment. His normally serious face is shadowed with a kind of bone-weariness he hasn't seen since Harry's funeral; his eyes are beset with deep shadows, skin a pallid grey.

Clarity comes almost instantly like a bucket of ice water—for as challenging the past month has been for him and Leah, he has not the burden of tolerating the Cullens on a near twenty-four-hour basis, nor dealing with his only child declaring her intent to marry only months after her high school graduation. Hostile as Jacob may feel for Charlie's tolerance of the Cullens, he has always been good to the Black family: birthdays, holidays, funerals. Charlie has always been there.

Jacob knows his answer before the question is delivered to him on creamy-white cardstock.

ISABELLA MARIE SWAN

AND

EDWARD ANTHONY MASEN CULLEN

TOGETHER WITH THEIR FAMILIES

REQUEST THE HONOR OF YOUR PRESENCE

AT THE CELEBRATION OF THEIR MARRAIGE

SATURDAY, THE THIRTEENTH OF AUGUST

TWO THOUSAND AND SIX
FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE EVENING

420 WOODCROFT AVE

FORKS, WA

Leah glances at the paper for only a moment before turning to him, a wry smile on her face, but whatever unsympathetic comment she is about to make dies on her lips when she clocks his expression.

"You can't be serious," she says, except it comes out as more of a question than a statement, her voice cracking.

"Lee—"

"No. You made your choice," she bites out, tone sharp. "You don't get to have both. You don't get to do this to me."

Billy clears his throat. "Perhaps this would be better discussed in private."

Leah smiles at Billy, lips pulled tight over her teeth like a predator preparing for its prey. "No need. I'll see myself out."

She doesn't look back once as she walks out, and maybe that is what hurts the most.