I don't own twilight. What I own is my character's, personality, background, and the plot of my story.

Author's Note at the end.

"So, I will see you in the park?" Cece asks Edward on the phone.

"As long as you don't expect me to push you really high on the swing, you will," Edward replies. Bella rolls her eyes at Edward. Of course, he had to go and turn the incident into his entire personality.

Bella was talking to Rosalie yesterday, and Edward apparently tells people what happened like it's a badge of honor. Not the part where he pushed her too high despite her warning. No, the part where he freaked out and Cece turned out to be fine. Even Seth called Bella to complain about it. Apparently, Edward won't shut up about it and now everyone in his office knows that his daughter is so resilient that her reaction to falling from the swings is to laugh and tell him that she had fun.

Yes, she is eavesdropping. No, she has no shame. She doesn't trust Edward with Cece, yet. Plus, he hasn't earned the privilege of being around Cece unsupervised. Talking to her on the phone is a form of being around her. A voice inside her tells her that it's an infringement of his privacy and that he has a right to know, but she quickly shuts it down. If he is going to be good for Cece, he doesn't have to worry about his privacy being infringed.

"You want to talk to mummy?" she hears Cece asks Edward and realizes that she has been zoning out.

She taps back into the phone call and listens carefully. "Yes, sweetie." Bella quickly puts down the home phone in her office and pretends to work.

Suddenly, the door of her office is shoved open with a bang and is hit against the wall scaring the hell out of her even though she was expecting Cece to come. "Cece! How many times have we been over this? You can't keep slapping the door open this way!" she exclaims angryly. She has a mind to ground her every time she does it but she can't because she needs to pick her battles. She should have nipped it in the bud the first time it happened, but no. Charlie and she had to laugh over how Cece likes to make an entrance, and now that it's no longer cute, it's been impossible to get her to stop doing it.

"Sorry. My friend wants to talk to you," Cece whispers and then giggles showing that she isn't sorry at all.

"Your friend?" Bella challenges raising an eyebrow. One thing Bella doesn't need to worry about in this entire thing, is Cece getting along with Edward.

"Yes."

Bella makes the motion for Cece to hand the phone over as she tells her, "You do know that he is my friend, not yours, right?"

Cece shakes her head and hands Bella the phone before running out of the room while yelling, "I am going to watch TV," and then slams the door.

"God damn it. Insufferable ball of cuteness," Bella mutters to herself.

"It seems that you are being territorial," Edward tells her playfully in a sing-song voice.

"What?" Bella asks in confusion. Don't normal people say hello first before they make bizarre statements?

"He is my friend not yours? Does that ring a bell?" he asks her.

"Ohh, yeah. What's wrong with that?" She asks him once she understands what he is talking about.

"It makes it sound like you are jealous."

"Of course not. That's not why I said it," she answers.

Edward is silent for a long time which makes Bella think that something happened on his end. "Edward? Are you still there?"

"Yes, yeah. I am. I am just thinking," he tells her sounding preoccupied.

"Okay, then. Why don't you share with the class?" she asks him.

"When you say that I am your friend, not hers, is it because you don't want her to get attached to me?" Edward asks sounding vulnerable.

She barks a loud laugh before she abruptly stops and tells him, "Boy you are doing a whole lot of think and yet only landing on wrong conclusions."

"What is it then?"

She takes a deep breath and fights the urge to tell him that she wants to slap him upside the head over his victim mentality and answers, "Telling her that you are my friend creates some sense of formality between you two. Without that formality there won't be space in the relationship. If she thinks that you two are friends there won't be any space for more. Friends don't turn out to be our daddies. I am trying to make sure that she isn't so shocked by you being her father that she rejects you. You need to have space between you and two so that when she finds out that you are her dad, there is still more to know about each other and explore together."

"Ohh," he mutters faintly.

"Yes, ohh. I am not secretly trying to use Cece to get to you. If I wanted to, I would simply not allow you into her life," she tells him in frustration. If she doesn't want him around Cece she would tell him to fuck off. He has signed off his parental rights. He is even more paranoid of her than she is of him and someday if he doesn't get his shit together, and stop with his melodramatic attitude, she will blow up on him.

A full minute of awkward silence follows that irritates Bella. "Is there anything you wanted to talk about?"

"Oh, yeah. I was wondering if you are interested in attending a barbecue at my parent's house," he tells her.

Bella pauses for a moment considering the best way to answer. "Not really."

There she said it. If he has a problem, it's not hers to solve. Just because he has changed and grown into a person she is okay with her daughter meeting, doesn't mean that the same thing applies to his family.

"Umm, would you be able to make it next week? We have those gatherings almost weekly," he tells her hopefully.

Bella rubs her hand across her face. So far, Bella has been extremely careful with the words she uses. Partly, because she doesn't want to make this harder on Cece than it already is. Having parents who are at odds won't be easy to deal with on top of discovering who your dad is when you are seven.

The other part is that she is worried that saying the wrong thing will trigger him into reverting. She doesn't want that. Yes, Edward has been at odds with his family for as long as she has known him, but it doesn't mean that he wasn't protective of them. He can talk shit about them as much as he wants, but she has no business even being angry at any slight against her. If he was angry at them and she agreed with his opinion, he would turn on her. Criticizing his family was never an option for her.

"Before I answer, you have to promise that you won't be angry at me," she tells him.

"Okay," he tells her quickly. "I promise to hear you out and not react negatively."

She takes a deep breathe. The only way to build a solid foundation of co-parenting is radical honesty. She has to do it. What is built on beating around the bush, and half truths will always be shaky.

"The last time I saw your family, Alice tried to slap me, and your mum insinuated that what you did was my fault. Everyone else watched silently and no one in your family tried to defend me. That behavior wasn't out of character for them. I have always have had to deal with snide comments and plain rude ones. I was always disrespected. You have told me of the steps you took to change and grow into a better person. My acceptance of you presence in Cece's life, doesn't includes them. I don't feel comfortable around them and I am not sure that they would be a good influence in Cece's life. I am sorry. I know that they are your family, but I will not surround Cece with people I feel unsafe with. I know that it seems self-centered to say that, but as a grown ass adult, if a group of people make me feel unsafe, I can't imagine how they will make my daughter feel."

A period of silence follows her statement. Bella leans back in her chair and closes her eyes as she waits for Edward to finally speak. For the first time since he returned to her life, she wishes the phone call was being done in person. She has memorized Edward. She knows what every blink he makes means. She would know exactly what he is thinking.

"No, it's not self-centered at all. I might not be happy with that, but I completely understand why feel this way. I hope with time you can trust me enough to know that I would stand up for you and Cece and would never let anyone hurt you two and let any of them around Cece unsupervised."

Bella is floored at Edward's reaction. She didn't expect that. She didn't see it coming. She expected him to not scream, or throw a temper tantrum, but she didn't expect a complete rational answer that validated her feelings, made it clear that he will never rush her into it until she is ready, and told her exactly how he will make sure her fears will happen.

"Are you sure you are okay with it?" She asks sciptically. She feels like she is in a dream. If Cece was in the room, she would ask her to pinch her.

"Yes I am," he tells her in a reassuring voice and then continues, " And Also, I really wanna apologize for what they did. It wasn't acceptable."

"Please don't. They never apologized for what you did, so you don't get to apologize for what they did," she tells him quickly before she pauses for a moment to think over her words and continues, "For what it's worth, I think it was my fault too. I should have demanded that you make them respect me. I should have given you hell over their behavior. Maybe if I did things would have been different."

She hears him huff loudly and then laugh an empty one then tell her, "Don't. Please don't. There is nothing you could have done differently. I was in no place to listen to anyone. I spent years in therapy while you were gone, yet I didn't touch in those sessions a single issue I have. The only different outcomes would have been me breaking up with you or things becoming worse."

Hello lovely people,

So, I can understand that some of you might be bothered by Bella's choice to keep Cece away from the Cullens, but please don't be. Bella isn't wrong in wanting to keep her daughter away from them and worrying that they will mistreat her the same way they mistreated Bella.

I can tell you from personal experience that if your dad's family mistreats your mum, they will definitely mistreat you. They will view you as an extension of your mum, not dad, and thus think of you as something they need to get through to get to your dad, or a wall to jump over to get to whatever they want from your dad: be it money, loyalty, or love.

It will even be worse than that for Cece because she grew up away from the Cullens. She is an outsider, while her dad is on the inside. In other words, a line is drawn in the sand between the friends and the foes. Cece isn't a friend. Now, this sounds extremely dramatic, but shitty relatives tend to be extremely dramatic and tend to hate their daughters in law for misogynistic reason, or cause they want to control her and/ or their son and she makes that impossible. If you want my opinion, people who want to control their relatives and family have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that they are the protagonist of a soap opera. If that isn't peak drama, I don't know what is.

Obviously, once Bella trusts Edward completely, she will trust that he will protect her and Cece from his family and make sure that they respect her, but until then, Bella and Cece are going no where near the Cullens.

Please leave a comment in the review section. It could be your favorite part, thoughts, feeling, or even criticism. Any and every comment you leave is read and taken into consideration. Your comments motivate me to update faster, and help me grow as a writer.

Until my next update,

Stay Safe