A/N: there is discussion of a miscarriage in this chapter. If that is a triggering subject for you, please proceed with caution or skip this chapter.

CHAPTER 22

I wake with your memory over me

That's a real fucking legacy to leave

~ Taylor Swift, Maroon

Holly POV

IF I CAN'T HAVE LOVE, I WANT POWER | Interviews: Bella + Edward

"So," I started, eying Bella as she sat across from me.

We were back in her living room this time. She had shown her dominance by readjusting every pillow again. But she did it with a smile thrown over at Sherry, the woman whose job it was to fluff the pillow, so as to not actually offend her.

Because I was starting to realize that Bella–the Isabella Cullen–was just a woman. She wasn't some otherworldly being with no soul who was power hungry and swimming in money without a care in the world.

She was just… Bella. She adjusted the pillows because she was nervous and wanted that tiny ounce of control over the situation. She made herself smoothies for breakfast in the morning. The only two calls she took if she was working on set were from her husband or son. There had been a piece of jewelry she thought was pretty on set and she asked the clothing coordinator where she could get it for her granddaughter.

As nice as it was to know she was just a normal woman like the rest of the world, it also left me with a deep knot of dread in my gut. Because what normal woman could go through what she did and come out on the other side unscathed?

"So," she countered.

She didn't like any warning over what our topic of the day would be. Something every other person in the world would have reasonably requested.

It'll give me too much time to plan my answers, she told me. To tell only bits and pieces of the truth.

"We've been talking for a few weeks now and you never mention any significant others prior to Edward."

Bella pressed her lips together, narrowly resisting the urge to roll her eyes. She sat back, pulling the sleeves of her black cashmere sweater over her hands. "That's because none of them were significant," she shot back.

I sat back. Raised a brow.

Bella sighed. "I think I dated three people in total before meeting my husband. Ryan Gregory, my Tainted co-star. Honestly I don't know if that situation can really be considered dating. We broke up when we finished filming the first movie and neither of us were very upset about it.

"There was Peter. We were… a disaster, honestly. Far too similar to ever actually have a functioning romantic relationship. It was very on-again-off-again for a while until we realized we made excellent friends and that was it." She hesitated, tugging at the sleeves of her sweater again. "Next was Jacob Black."

"You met while you were working on Unknown?"

She nodded. "Won an Emmy for it."

I smiled at her attempt to change the subject. It was rather outrageous that her attempt at a segue was the mention of a prestigious award actors would kill for. And to her, it was a distraction.

"Jacob… he's probably my biggest regret in my life. Maybe. I don't know. I've made a lot of shitty decisions, I guess. But I was eighteen and stupid. And trusting. That was my biggest mistake."

"Trusting Jacob?"

She shrugged. "Trusting anybody. Ironically, the only person in the industry who has never stabbed me in the back is Peter. Even with our shitty period dating, he was always a good guy. Still is."

"How did things end with Jacob?" I pushed, ignoring her second attempt at distracting me.

There were far more interesting things about the woman rather than her dating history, but it was still part of her history that I was attempting to unravel.

"I found out he was married. He called me a convenient fuck. End of story."

"You really…" I hesitated. I didn't want to shame her or bring up old wounds, but I was genuinely curious. "You really didn't know he was married? It's okay if–"

"I didn't know," she answered quickly. "I know it makes me sound like an idiot. He was a public figure. If you really searched for it, you could find out he was married. They kept it discrete, but it was out there. Again, it was the trusting thing. I didn't want people googling me and knowing every detail of my life, so I gave others the same courtesy. Thus ending my era of trusting anybody."

She looked away, pressing her lips together and seeming to push away the anger that had started to boil behind her eyes. They softened suddenly before she looked back at me. "Then, I met Edward."

Bella was obviously lost in her own thoughts, maybe reliving that moment she met her husband. I left her to her own memories for a few minutes before she refocused back on me.

"I had let Hollywood win for a while. I played my part and did what I was told. Then I met Edward and he… he just has this way of not giving a shit about anyone else. That sounds bad, but it was incredibly refreshing for me because I cared too much. About everything and everyone and he just didn't. He cared about himself and his family and that was it."

"So was it a love at first sight kind of thing?"

She fought a smile. "I think it was more of a lust at first sight kind of thing. He whispered dirty things to me all night, I thought dirty things about him all night. Then I remembered who I was and what I did and tried to run away.

"But I had given Alice tickets to the show the next night and he showed up. This is going to sound stupid but I remember feeling so undeniably safe when he was around. Even from that first night I felt calm and protected and secure with him."

"Really?" I blurted out, my professionalism sprinting out the door at my shock.

Edward had been nothing but kind to the entire crew. He could be a little gruff at times but it was usually where his wife's security was involved. Still, it had been weeks and I still got a pit of dread in my stomach whenever the man looked at me. Like if I made one wrong move I would end up at the bottom of Lake Michigan.

Bella's smile was kind and patient. She knew the effect he had on people, she had to.

"Yes," she said softly. "People always say meeting him was the start of 'my downfall' or whatever," she rolled her eyes, doing air-quotes with a grimace. "And, I mean, I've learned to ignore basically 99% of what people say about me, but that's the one that still pisses me off to this day."

"Why?" I asked. Because there was some awful stuff written about her, still to this day.

"Because if I had never found him I wouldn't have survived," she said fiercely, though her eyes got glassy as tears threatened to overflow. She forced herself to sit straighter, blinking away the tears and focusing on me. "Edward… he's been by my side since I was twenty. Through everything. My career and the scrutiny that comes with it… it's suffocating. And sometimes I feel like I'm drowning underneath all of the comments and expectations and demands. But, Edward doesn't let that happen. If he sees that I'm getting burned out or at my limit he has no problem telling everyone to fuck off and leave me alone."

Bella sighed happily, a calm smile on her face. "We've been through some pretty shitty things and he's never left. Never blamed me even when I deserved it. He's never done anything but love me and support me and be there for me when the entire fucking world was tearing me apart.

"I wouldn't…" she shook her head, leaning back into the couch with her arms crossed. "I wouldn't be here without him. So people saying shit like he's the reason my career ever faltered really pisses me off."

–Love|Power–

Edward sat on the couch in his home office. He was dressed fairly casual–for him–wearing a pale blue button down and dark gray slacks. He ran a hand through his messy, copper hair before his attention settled on me as I sat across from him.

His intimidation factor was still there, even after spending a decent amount of time around the man by now. His presence still made the air in the room seem to freeze, still made everyone in the place tense.

Except for his wife, who never failed to smile at him whenever he walked into the room.

"In an earlier interview about the beginning of your relationship with Bella you said, 'It wasn't easy. She was on tour and I had commitments in Chicago. I had never been great at monogamy up until that point. But somehow, even back then, I think we both knew. She was mine, I was hers, end of story.'"

Edward nodded.

I should have known better than to leave it so open ended. People like Bella, who had been doing interviews since they were a teenager, were practically trained to keep the conversation going. People like Edward were going to make you fight for every ounce of information.

"What were you like before Bella?"

"I was an asshole," he said, eyes landing on me. He took pity on me and kept going. "I had a different woman in my bed every night whose name I never bothered to remember. I was high more often than not, and I didn't really give a shit about it. About anything."

"When you first met Bella did you want her to be another nameless woman?" I asked reflexively before I remembered who I was talking to.

He scrubbed his palm across his chin. "When I first laid eyes on her… saw the tattoos and that cocky little smirk as she caught me blatantly insulting her without knowing, yeah I just wanted her in my bed. But by the end of the night I was more fascinated by her than I had ever been by any other woman."

"Why?" I asked, quickly clarifying when he looked at me like I had four heads. "What made you want her more than anyone else? Was it because she was an actress? Because she was someone so many other people wanted?"

"It was because everyone around her was so obviously blind to what I could see clear as day. My sister roped her into a conversation about her work and Bella obliged. Got her to give her free tickets to her sold out show the next night. They saw her job and they saw what she could do for them. No one at the table actually saw her. Not the way I did."

"What did you see when you looked at her?"

"I saw a woman selfless to a fault. Someone who put everyone else's happiness above her own. Someone who was hiding behind a smile and hoping no one ever realized it. And I–shit, I never cared about anyone else in my life up until that point but I would have walked in front of a bullet for her after that first night. Still would."

His eyes held a challenge; dared me to question his loyalty and commitment to her.

I stayed quiet.

–Love|Power–

"Christ, you have got to stop fidgeting," Edward mumbled, placing his hand over his wifes and giving them both a squeeze.

"This is weird. It's weird. We don't need to do this. It's–"

"It's not weird," he countered.

She looked at him like he had lost his mind. "I spent a very good portion of my time over the last thirty years making sure we never did anything like this."

"Maybe our reluctance to ever do anything like this is the reason why we get divorced every six months," he joked, mocking the tabloids that loved to run a Cullen divorce on a slow news day.

Bella scoffed out a laugh, but smiled up at her husband without any hint of the anxiety that had been clouding her eyes a minute earlier.

It always felt slightly intrusive, just looking at the two of them. Maybe it was because their marriage had always been kept so private or because they somehow seemed to be able to communicate with a simple look. But it was obvious every rumor that their marriage was fake or in trouble was very wrong.

Bella relaxed back into the couch, subtly scooting herself closer to her husband. She stopped fidgeting with her fingers and firmly grasped his hand in hers, keeping a firm grip on it as she crossed her legs.

She wore a sheer, patterned black button down with a black tank-top underneath. It was tucked into a pair of dark jeans with her feet covered in a pair of those familiar red-bottomed heels she seemed to have a never-ending closet full of.

Edward had been sent upstairs to change after he came down wearing a nearly identical outfit to hers, minus the sheerness of his black button down. He had opted for gray this time.

"So you two, I mean, there's never been a rocky patch?"

Bella looked over at me with a soft smile that was filled with decades of wisdom. "There's a rocky patch about every other day. I love him but that doesn't mean he doesn't piss me off every now and then. Like, okay," Bella sat forward, eyes bright. "Edward has stolen my phone charger practically every morning for the last thirty years."

"That's an exaggeration."

"There was a year in there where I was in jail and didn't have a phone, so twenty-nine years."

I watched the two of them, bickering but still smiling at each other and somehow realized that, while rare, true love might actually exist. It was incredibly endearing, listening to them squabble about something so mundane as a phone charger. And a little astonishing that Bella's idea of a rocky patch is Edward stealing her phone charger and not the year long separation while she was incarcerated.

We were getting ahead of ourselves in the story, though.

I cleared my throat. "So, you were twenty," I said to Bella before turning toward her husband. "And you were twenty-six when you two met and started dating. Then a couple months later there were reports of a trashed hotel room in New York."

Bella leaned forward animatedly. "Okay, it wasn't trashed."

Edward fought a smile. "It was trashed."

Bella gasped, turning toward him. "No it wasn't."

Edward shook his head. "It was. I paid quite the cleaning fee."

"I–" Bella sighed, falling back against the couch. "I didn't think it was that bad. But there was a lot of champagne involved."

"Were you celebrating something?"

Bella shrugged. "No. Just… trying to figure shit out. Which resulted in champagne and a trashed hotel room, apparently."

"You were on a pretty intense press tour by the next day. Was that the last time you saw each other before the shooting?"

In hindsight, the question was offensively cavalier. It happened over thirty years ago but it was a traumatic experience. She nearly died. Had a miscarriage. Thought she lost any chance at conceiving a child in the future.

The teasing smiles faded quickly.

"Yes," Bella answered before I could apologize. "It was."

"I was out of the country," Edward said solemnly. "Didn't have cell service until a couple weeks later."

My focus was on Bella. On the way her fidgeting started up again and the way Edward didn't stop it, just kept his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze.

"Did you know? Before the… incident did you know you were…"

She shook her head. "No. It was still early. I… sometimes my life feels unreal. Like I'm an outsider watching from the sidelines and that–I don't know. Maybe it's just a coping mechanism because that's something I really don't think or talk about. Ever. But maybe that's just because I like to pretend it didn't actually happen."

Everyone went silent. The crew behind me froze. Nobody said a word for a solid two minutes.

Bella cleared her throat. "I, um, had a lot of damage to my shoulder. Had to wear this annoying-as-hell sling for a while."

Edward looked over at her, a hesitant smile on his face. "You flatlined on the operating table twice and your chief complaint was about that sling."

"It was annoying," she grumbled. "Then I had to do it all over again about a year ago. Something about scar tissue. I haven't had a tremor since, though, which is nice."

Edward's attention locked on me for a moment, and I took the hint and tried to quickly change the subject.

"You disappeared for a while after that," I said, eying my notes. "Well, after winning two academy awards, a Screen Actor's Guild Award, a Golden Globe, and three Grammy Awards for Badlands."

Bella's lips twitched with a smile. I assumed she'd talk about the awards, but she bypassed that accomplishment quickly. "I like to think of that as our honeymoon."

"We weren't even engaged," Edward countered.

"I know," she shrugged. "But we didn't have an actual honeymoon after we got married because we were both too busy. So, in my mind, that was our honeymoon."

Bella smiled over at her husband as he smirked down at her. And I couldn't help but feel like I was encroaching on a private moment again. It was kind of remarkable, hearing the story first hand.

The two of them had been plastered across tabloids for decades for affairs and scandals and messy divorces but all of that couldn't have been further from the truth. I almost hated to keep digging into their story, because I knew what was coming next.

"It was a few months after you got married that…"

Bella sighed, that awestruck, loving gaze she had trained on her husband fading as she turned to me, her face devoid of any emotion. "That I put four bullets through Aro Volturi's chest."

A/N: These interview chapters might be my favorite part of this series. I hope you guys like them as much as I do. See you next time!