A/N: Thanks so much for all your wonderful thoughts.

It's a pretty winter wonderland outside as I write this. We've received more snow in NJ over the past week or so than the previous two winters. I love it. Winter in the northeast is meant to be cold and snowy, and I, for one, have missed it. Hope that wherever you guys are, you're enjoying your weather.

Also, a couple of you messaged me to let me know I screwed up last chapter. I called our resident ghost 'Edward Cullen' rather than 'Edward Masen.' Oops. Thanks so much for letting me know. See, those things happen when you've been working on a WIP for as long as I've been on this one. You forget the names of your own characters. ;) Either way, if all goes well, we'll finish this one before our crazy weather patterns change drastically again. ;)

Most characters belong to S. Meyer. The rest belong to me. All mistakes are mine.

Chapter 12 – You've Got Mail

Afternoon naps can go either way for me. In the past, I've woken from a nap with a new outlook on life, reenergized for the remainder of the day, and overflowing with enough physical and mental fortitude to leap tall buildings while solving rigorous algorithms. I've also woken from afternoon naps feeling as if I've been pancaked by a steamroller. Despite these odds, when faced with the possibility that I'd acquired ghost-like qualities, I figured a midday, conscious-abolishing nap was in order.

Not that I had a clue what, if anything, a nap would accomplish. I was hypothesizing, making up odds while tripping along this untraversed path, or rather, untraversed as far as I knew. Had another woman in history ever lived with a ghost, then found herself…

Anyway. The point was that there was as equitable a chance that I'd wake rested as there was that I'd wake increasingly distressed or even that I'd wake wholly transformed into a phantasmic creature able to slip through walls and glide down staircases and forever trapped within the confines of this property.

OOOOO

Facing one of these three après-nap outcomes, I sat upright, all at once a few hours later. I stretched my arms above me and tugged one wrist taut, then the other. I rolled my neck and smiled at the low, satisfied, instinctive hum that crawled up my chest and slipped past my throat. Stiff joints popped, snapped, and crackled like sizzling embers. With a prolonged and audible yawn, my gaze reflexively panned toward the windows.

Milky frost encrusted the glass panes, sparkling like sequins on a bridal gown. Outside, a quilt flannel shrouded every evergreen, every bush, and every mountain until the world's ivory gleam grew almost blinding. Nonetheless, like an unblemished crown of sapphires, the sky reigned over all.

I sighed.

Gone was the lightheaded, dopey sensation of earlier. Confusion lingered, but I'd always found confusion healthy, even helpful. Confusion was an impetus, a step above curiosity, in itself a nudge toward research. What I abhorred was fear, namely, my own. Thankfully, resting my head was the elixir to fighting an irrational bout of fear.

In this refreshed state, I hopped out of bed, bare feet slapping against wood floors as I sprinted toward the door, extending a hand for the doorknob while concurrently rushing forward. Millimeters from contact with the gilded brass, I swiftly retracted my hand.

Not because I was still insensible with fear. But if my hand was going to slip through the doorknob again, I wanted to be prepared. Slowly, wriggling my fingertips, I stretched out my hand. When the tips brushed the smooth surface, I expelled a breath and relaxed my shoulders. Just to make sure, I bounced my fingers off of the metal a few more times, then I finally turned the knob and pulled open the door.

"Ed!"

Unfortunately, my mouth worked faster than my eyes. An empty staircase greeted me, along with a weighty silence. The hush seemed to envelop every particle of space, so thick it was as if a snow boulder broke off one of the mountains and avalanched into each level of the three-story Victorian as I slept. Nothing creaked. Nothing groaned. Nothing shifted or flashed. No one lurched forward or glided past.

"Ed?"

More than the lack of reply, more than neither seeing nor hearing him, I felt Edward's absence from every nook and cranny of the Victorian.

Still, I took the steps one at a time, regulating my pace and breathing. Because I refused to surrender once again to panic. On evenly measured footsteps, I headed to my desk and laptop. The Christmas tree lights twinkled as I passed them, eliciting a wistful smile as I sat.

No, I wouldn't panic.

But, when I faced forward, the smile evaporated, and my brow furrowed. I wondered at first if I'd neglected to shut my laptop earlier, then recalled that I hadn't opened my laptop earlier. Yet, here it lay, not only open but powered on.

Within moments of scanning the screen, the questions of why my laptop was open and powered on were answered and simultaneously rendered moot. More critical was the nauseating number of active tabs spread across the top of the screen like cramped measurements across a ruler. Each tab's logo was so small it was unrecognizable. The current tab – all the way to the right and, therefore, the most recent tab – was a search engine. Typed into the search bar was the term,

'What is A.I.?'

I raised an intrigued brow, gliding my mousepad finger downward and scanning the page's numerous hits. With curiosity mounting, I scrolled to the previous tab and clicked, discovering that, before researching AI, Edward searched the definition of Social Media.

I sat back. For a few seconds, I stared at the screen, unblinking and scrubbing a palm back and forth against my jaw. Objectively, I couldn't recall a conversation between Edward and me where he'd granted me permission to rummage through his searches. Probably because I couldn't recall a conversation between us where he'd mentioned using my laptop to scour the internet. But it was my laptop. Nonetheless, the fact that he'd conducted research on my property didn't sanction an uninvited intrusion into his thoughts.

These objective ruminations were conducted over a few heartbeats. Emotionally, however, and with almost embarrassing eagerness, my eyes and hands overrode my brain. Dragging the wheels of my office chair forward, I delved back in, working in order from right and most recent to left and the older searches.

Before asking the search engine for the meaning of AI, Edward researched the definition of Social Media. Before that, there was a tab open to information about COVID-19. Before that was-

"Donald Trump? What the-?"

A tab regarding Gay Rights preceded that one. Before that, he researched President Obama.

Before that was a tab searching 'The stock market crash of 2008';

Before that, The dawn of cell phones;

9/11;

The dawn of the World Wide Web;

Reaganomics;

The Vietnam Era;

The Wars in the Middle East;

JFK's assassination;

The 1969 Moon Landing;

The Civil Rights Movement;

The Cold War;

World War II;

The rise of Fascism;

The stock market crash of 1929;

The repeal of Prohibition.

Once again, I shoved away from my desk, mind reeling. I cradled my head between my hands, expelling erratic breaths and pausing for a reset – of my brain, if not of the tabs. With a deep breath, I dove back into the four unopened tabs.

The fourth tab from the left read 'Timelines and summaries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'

"Ahh," I whispered with a nod, "the hodgepodge begins to make sense."

Edward was brilliant; I'd inwardly, if not outwardly, acknowledged as much weeks ago. Still, in some ways, he was as naïve as a child, perhaps more so. A child born in its times would slowly absorb and assimilate into the intricacies and events of its environs. Even an alien suddenly dropped onto Earth would've likely performed years of reconnaissance and surveillance before dropping in.

Edward knew close to nothing of the past hundred years on this planet. He was like a coma patient asleep on and off for a century, who'd awoken a few times yet had shown no interest in interacting or learning of the world around him, not until recently…not until my arrival. As a result, he'd missed the one century with perhaps the most innovation, the most crises, and the most overall change ever occurring in world history.

And, apparently, he'd reached the limits of his patience with all he didn't know.

Three tabs remained. I skimmed my middle finger across the mouse pad, wondering about these three subjects. Edward had searched these three even before pulling up the timelines on the fourth tab - the tab that prompted the ensuing searches.

What were the top three subjects on Edward Masen's mind?

The third tab Edward opened had a sole word – a name – typed into the search bar:

Charlotte

One name. Nine letters. As far as search terms went, it was a vague term, producing innumerable hits of every variety, as vague search terms tend to. We had a U.S. city by that name. Also, a university, a sports team, a makeup line, etc. Perhaps the Charlotte Edward had meant to find laid buried somewhere within the hundreds if not thousands of hits produced by the search term.

For a few thundering heartbeats, I stared at the screen, motionless. Eventually, swallowing hard, I managed to move the cursor to the second tab.

'Women's rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'

My brows rose high. This was Edward's second search of the afternoon, occurring before his quasi-search for the woman who'd carried his child and who he'd meant to marry?

Yet…wasn't it a recurring theme between us – this contrast and disparity between women's roles in Edward's period and our roles now, and despite how far we'd come since the 1920s, how far we still had to go?

Moreover, in a roundabout way, the subject was the catalyst of the morning's incident. He'd displayed his usual chivalry-toeing-the-line-into-chauvinism tendencies because that was what was expected of a man in his day. I'd reacted by losing my patience and lashing out because that was what was expected when a man attempted to limit a woman. And then…well, I'd locked myself up in my room like a princess trying to hide away in a castle, and Edward came down here.

Heart pounding, I dragged the cursor to the left, the first tab and the first search Edward performed at my laptop as I napped. There, I…hovered for a few seconds, then eased my finger off the mouse pad and slowly backed up.

I fluttered my fingers, shaking off my hands as if they'd been shocked by a livewire. I scrubbed the tingling fingertips against my thighs, attempting to wipe off extreme curiosity like one wipes off sticky fingers.

This was wrong. This went beyond inquisitiveness. This was tantamount to intrusion into Edward's mind.

Shooting forward, I hammered my middle finger against the mouse pad and gasped as I backed up again. The truth was that the temptation to know Edward's mind – to discover what was his foremost question in this new world, to him, an almost omniscient world where answers are sometimes laid literally at your fingertips – was too great.

The first tab read:

'What might cause a vibrant, intelligent, young, and beautiful woman to take on the qualities of a ghost?'

Somewhere in the middle of my audible hitch of breath, the heavy silence around me broke. The front door creaked open, allowing in a howl of blustering wind, then eased shut.

A/N: Thoughts?

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