Well, we're home from a whirlwind NYC weekend, and so thankful for all of you!

Chapter 11: The Only Gift I'll Ever Need

Rosalie

Monday, December 11th

Seattle, Washington

"You want to do what?" I hear my mother in law shriek through the phone. I smile as Esme Cullen's patience is once again tested by her two sons. "Why must you two insist on taking years off my life every time I speak to you?"

She speaks of her sons with mock exasperation.

"Hey, I'm not pulling a total Jasper here," Emmett backpedals at the sound of his mother panicking over the news of us asking her to help us on our journey to homeownership. "I'm not surprising Rose with a house in three weeks at Christmas like he did to Alice on Sycamore."

"Thank you for that," I hear Esme sigh in relief, though I know it's all in good fun. There isn't anything she wouldn't do for her family, house hunting included, despite being in the thick of the holiday season.

"Told you Mimi wouldn't mind helping us," I tell Noelle as she sits in her high chair at the kitchen table, babbling her way through her dinner.

"Hep uss?"

"Yes, help us. She's going to help find a house for us!"

"Hass?"

I can listen to her little words for hours.

Most of my nights are spent by Noelle's side, the two of us having these tiny little conversations about everything and nothing. I listen like my life depends on it, because it does. For a long time, I dreamed of these moments – moments like these when it was just the two of us strengthening the love between us – for as long as I can remember. When Emmett and I had lost our first baby, this was the first thing that came to mind as the realization sunk in and the darkness settled deep within us both. Little moments like this, as Noelle and I chatter back and forth as we eat our dinner peacefully surrounded by twinkling Christmas lights and snow globes, was what I grieved for with the baby we lost.

I still feel the loss with every breath I take, trying to navigate all of my motherhood firsts with Noelle knowing that she is not my first. She is my everything. My reason for breathing.

But she's not my first.

It's a delicate line I walk each day, and I choose to walk on the side that brings me life and joy and fills me with unbelievable happiness.

But sometimes I slip and fall to the other side, always briefly as the pull of the brighter side is stronger than the darker side.

I choose to be stronger than the broken shell of the woman I was two years ago.

Two years ago, I let the love of my life walk out of our apartment in Hoboken, and I did nothing to stop him. I watched him go, watched him take the last piece of my heart with him, and believed I deserved the despair that settled into whatever was left of my shattered heart.

But I'm not that person anymore. Emmett leaving that December day helped me realize I was losing much more than the baby I had carried for the weeks I had been blessed with, and ever since then, I veer away from the shadows and allow myself to live the life I worked so damn hard to have.

So, yes. I want that house with a picket fence and a sprawling yard. I want to cook dinner and stare out the window at Noelle playing outside with neighborhood friends. I want Emmett to walk in the front door with a smile for his daughter and a devilish kiss full of promises of later for me.

I've fucking earned it.

"Yes, Rose knows about it," Emmett groans, walking back into the kitchen in a pair of gray sweats and a plain white tee, yawning as he scratches his stomach. He heads over to the stove and begins making a plate, placing his phone on the counter next to him. "Rose isn't like Alice. She'd kill me if I bought a house without her even looking at it."

The laugh filtering through the speaker on Emmett's phone is soft, but it's there. "I'd pay good money for you to try it."

"Don't give him any ideas, Jasper," I call out from the table, and it feels good to hear Jasper laugh for the second time tonight.

"You never know," Jasper says, his voice louder now that Emmett has made himself a plate and pulls his chair back at the table to join us. He smiles at Noelle and pretends to take a bite off her plate, making her squeal with laughter like she usually does when she's with her Daddy.

"There's a difference between you and your brother," I tell Jasper as we settle into dinner. "You're sensible. You think. You listen. You remember. You remember everything that Alice has ever told you and you plan. Meanwhile, Emmett here has always been very spontaneous. He'd buy us a house in the Maldives without a second thought."

"Who complains about the Maldives?"

"You and Alice are insanely in sync," I say to him around a bite of chicken parm. "Always so in tune with each other that only you two could pull off buying a house on complete faith. You two and Jim and Pam from The Office."

"Yeah, well…" Jasper trails off quietly, not adding anything else. I catch the slight beat of hesitation instantly, my brows furrowing at the idea, but Emmett bulldozes right past it.

"I don't even know where to start, bro," Emmett says. "I can work from home so I have a little more flexibility than Rose does. We don't want Rose to have a shitty commute to and from work each day."

"You have to think about daycares," Jasper says with a sigh. "Even though it honestly doesn't even matter how close you are in the end. We live literally down the road from both our daycare and our work, and even then, Alice has been late to work more now than she has in her whole life."

"It gets easier," I offer, trying to swallow down the worry I have that the image of an overwhelmed Alice brings to my mind. "How is everyone, Jas?"

He sighs, the exhaustion heavy in his voice. "Good," he replies. "Tired, trying to get into the new routine with Alice going back to work and all, but we're good."

He doesn't elaborate, which isn't like the brother-in-law I've come to know and love, but I don't push the issue.

For now.

His quiet demeanor, the way he doesn't elaborate in ways he typically does, has me thinking of the early days with Noelle. How the days were long, and the nights somehow longer, and how I never knew how much I needed my family and friends, my village, more than ever in those moments.

Motherhood, I've learned over the last fifteen months, is like an iceberg. People see what they want to see, only to find out the hard way that sometimes there is a mountain of unknown, of uncertainty, fluttering beneath the surface. There is a constant worry about, well, pretty much everything. Most days I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, and I've learned to listen to my baby the most. People can tell me all the advice their mother's have given them, and their mother's mother before them, but the only one I'll ever hear is Noelle.

And it makes me think about the last time I've heard from Alice.

And my heart is broken when I realize I can't remember the last time I talked to her for longer than a passing minute.