At sunset, Phil built them a driftwood fire as her mother poured the wine. They sat in companionable silence watching the sky, stealing glances at Bella. She could feel their worry washing over her in gentle determined waves. Where it had once irritated her, crawling under her skin in a nagging persistence, now it was a growing comfort; a sign she was loved and cared for. Her nine months of invisibility were almost gone. They couldn't know what the birth would truly mean, but still they worried. She sat silent, sipping on hot cider, watching the flames, their salt-blue hue a sad echo in her mind.

"Bella, it's getting late," Renée said softly. "We ought to turn in."

She pretended not to hear her mother, staring unblinking into the flames. She fingered the small charm dangling around her neck, her nails finding the familiar groove on one side of the wooden wolf's body that was deeper than the others. She was good at pretending. Maybe too good. But pretending sometimes made things true, for a while at least. Or maybe it made them more true until she could choose them for their own sake instead of pretending she didn't care. Her fingers tightened on the wolf. Edward's pained expression flit across her memory. He'd found the small wooden charm hidden in the corner of her underwear drawer, the second week of their honeymoon.

"Isabella, what's this?" He'd asked, his voice low and soft and dangerous. His eyes were almost black, the familiar amber hue fading as his need to feed grew.

"It's mine." She'd snatched it away, her hand brushing his. He'd flinched back as if she'd burned him. "It's nothing."

"It is not nothing," Edward replied, breathing slowly through his nose. He took another deliberate step away from her, as he always did when he was trying to control himself, only this time it had felt—wrong. Different. "If you love me, get rid of it."

They both knew what he really meant. Get rid of him. Edward had allowed her to love Jacob Black, knowing he still commanded her soul. But now he couldn't abide even the memory of him, as if it clung to her skin, sinking into her bones, contaminating her, hiding her from him. She chuckled at the thought. He'd been right to worry. She didn't know it then, but that day was the beginning of the end. Or maybe it was just the first time she couldn't quite pretend to want this immortal life anymore. But she still tried, clinging stubbornly to her foolishness. She'd left her whole world behind, abandoned them all for the Cullens, convinced that never dying was worth the cost of her humanity.

"Stupid," she whispered. She'd chosen so many stupid things. And she'd almost damned herself to a path from which there would've been no return. If not for Jacob.

The fire shifted, the flames burning lower. Bella turned to scan the dark swath of beach, the water a steady breathing force on her left. Phil had gathered a decent pile of driftwood and she picked up a small stick, poking gently at the heated center. Then she wrapped her arms around herself, resting them on the burgeoning swell of her stomach, but she wasn't cold. As she watched the glowing heat of the fire, she smiled, feeling the wriggling movement of the baby inside her. The heat should've been another clue.

Even as a little girl, Bella was sensitive to the cold, resentful of the turn of the seasons every September. It had grown worse the more time she spent with the Cullens, the more weight and sleep she lost from the constant anxiety of being a human in a monster's world. She rubbed the fading scar on her wrist again, hating it, and yet grateful for it. She'd been bitten by a vampire and survived, but those kinds of wounds never truly heal. The scar had always been icy cold to the touch, like marble. For the last nine months, the sensation had slowly ebbed away, like mist melting under the rising sun, until it was almost gone. Another clue.

She allowed herself to be blind for so long. It had been easy to ignore the sharp increase of her fatigue, the growing nausea, and sore breasts and back, and the steady heat slowly building inside her. It was too easy to look back now and wonder at her ignorance. She was so young then. She was still young. Not even twenty. It was almost six weeks after her supposed wedding when all the pieces finally came together.

Edward had returned from hunting with Emmett and Jasper, the three of them more relaxed than they'd been in almost a month. Almost human. Almost. Jasper smelled her first, his head whipping around to where she sat on the patio, every muscle taught, hands trembling. Bella froze, a half-eaten spoon of peanut butter hanging out of her mouth. Jasper struggled more than the others to curb his thirst for human blood, and she lived with a constant buzz of anxiety whenever he and Alice visited. But the look on his face that night wasn't the same intense gnawing hunger of a predator for it's prey. It was revulsion. And fear. He looked as if he smelled a Quileute wolf.

Bella hadn't had the chance to blink before Edward and Emmett's expressions shifted into the mirror images of their brother, their stances morphing effortlessly into defensive crouches.

"Wolves," Emmett snarled, eyes darting around.

Edward moved so fast, Bella didn't even catch the usual blur of motion. He grabbed her above the elbow, but flinched back with a snarling gasp. As if her bare skin had burned him.

"Edward," Jasper's voice was tight with an undercurrent of curiosity. "Why does your human smell like a werewolf?"

"Isabella," Edward turned to her, nostrils flared, panting through his open mouth. She hated when he called her by her full name. It made her sound old and childish all at once.

Before she could answer him, a hint of some sick, cloying smell, with a harsh edge of ammonia had filled her nose. Bella vaulted from her seat towards a clump of rose bushes, emptying her stomach in violent heaving motions. What was happening? She dry heaved again, trembling, trying to think.

"Is she sick?" Emmett asked, his voice hushed.

"She's burning up!" Edward hissed. "And she reeks of—of—of that—" He choked on his words, but Jasper supplied the rest.

"That Quileute wolf."

Jake.

"Could she catch something from them?" Emmett's concern had tugged at her.

"I'm not sick." She stood and turned, sweat clinging to her skin. It was so obvious, it was laughable. She wanted to cry. "I think I—I'm," she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, trying not to breathe in that smell. Their scent. "I think I'm pregnant." She blinked, staring at them, those words the first domino that sent her brittle world crashing around her.