It is three in the morning and I am woken, to my intense surprise, by a panicked Esme standing over me in my bedroom and shaking me.

"Bella wake up please!"

"What is it Esme?", I ask in confusion.

"I was loading blood into the processing machine and... And...", she does not seem able to form words, but points at her pants which are bloodstained.

"And you spilled some?" I wonder what the fuss is about.

"NO!" Esme takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. "I felt something inside me, down there. And then it just trickled out."

I slowly push myself upright on my elbows. "You mean to say... You are having a period?"

She nods. "I think so."

I don't ask her why she is talking about this to me, instead of the literal doctor that is her husband. Lord knows I would have combusted in embarrassment if this happened to me and I would have had to go to Edward about it.

"How can I help?"

"Well, the thing is. It has been a while since I had a period. In my time we just used rags that we fastened in our underwear. I understand there are all of these products now, but I have no clue how they work, and the stores are closed at this hour anyway."

I lead her into my bathroom, wondering if my life has reached peak weirdness yet, or if there is another curveball coming. I lend Esme some clean underwear and pants and demonstrate how to use a disposable pad, explaining that of the available options those are probably the most familiar to her. I show her a box of tampons and explain how they work and what types and sizes are available.

Halfway through a lecture on the existence of menstrual cups Rosalie climbs in through my window.

"Hey there, I was wondering where Esme had disappeared off to and followed her scent here."

"Esme was just having some woman trouble and needed to be brought up to speed on the 21st century way of handling that.", I explain.

Rosalie looks at the packages spread across my bed and, having recently been to high school, quickly makes the connection.

She freezes, and an odd look flashes across her face. I remember how deeply she yearns to have children, and realize what possibilities she must be thinking of. She quickly pushes it aside though, and hugs Esme.

"Now I am a bit behind the times as well, but I believe the human girls all say that being on your period gives you permission to eat as much chocolate as you want. This sounds like a situation that requires cake."

I smile at her gratefully over Esme's shoulder. "I should have all the ingredients for brownies in the kitchen. By the time we are done baking and eating those the pharmacy will have opened up so we can get Esme some supplies of her own."

We proceed to the kitchen and work together to create the most decadent triple chocolate brownies we have made to date.

We are eventually interrupted by my confused looking father coming downstairs. "Bells, did I miss a birthday?", he asks.

"No dad, we just needed some female bonding time."

"You just needed to bond by baking a cake in my kitchen at six in the morning?", he looks at Esme now, clearly expecting her to be the responsible adult in this situation.

"Charlie dear, those are brownies, and we needed some female bonding time.", she says, laying heavy emphasis on the word female. Dad swallows thickly, clearly no longer wanting to know anymore.

"Would you care to try some?", she asks when Rosalie pulls the tray out of the oven. Of course he wants to, nobody can resist Esme's baking.

We chat with my dad while we eat the entire tray of brownies, and dad also eats some normal breakfast. He has a long day of work ahead after all.

I still marvel at how well he gets along with the Cullens now. He has hated Edward from the start of course, which I have come to see his point about. Alice he used to like well enough, but only because of that summer when I had a broken leg and she spared him the embarrassment of having to help me shower and dress. Eventually he seems to have realized that I have other female friends that could have helped as well, and that outside of her helpfulness in this matter she is a pushy and petulant child. The other Cullens however are always welcome in our home, and he has even been to theirs a few times now that family dinners are a regular thing there that we can invite him to.

In this it helps that me becoming a vampire will not necessarily have to mean cutting contact with Charlie anymore. Once I decided I wanted to become one I had subconsciously started drawing away from him, to make it hit less hard when I would eventually disappear. All the more so when I learned of the Volturi and understood that him figuring out what vampires are would be a death sentence. However, if I were to start on processed blood immediately after changing, I would probably only have to stay away for some months, and not change too noticeably to lie believably about.

The current plan is that midway through college I'll "take a semester abroad", be changed, and return claiming to finally have tried Rosalie's skincare routine with very good results. It helps that it will now seemingly be possible to keep developing further as a vampire. However odd it is to think of a civil war veteran as still finishing up puberty, Jasper is now able to grow a full beard if eating enough human food, when he only remembers having spotty stubble as a human. Esme's current predicament is further proof.

Speaking of, the family is quite happy to age a few years. Carlisle barely looks old enough to be out of med school, and physically isn't. It is purely his old soul vibes and the extremely high quality fake ID's Jasper arranges that allow him to work in a hospital. The 'children' are all thoroughly fed up with high school, and want to be able to spend their time doing something useful. They have all decided to gradually age into their late twenties if possible and then pretend to be cousins or something at their next residence.

Dad will probably still suspect something is off, he is the chief of police after all, but not bad enough to put him in real danger. And he has been happy to get to know the Cullens better now that the extended timeline allows it.

He and Emmett often watch sports together. Jasper he likes to drag off to the shooting range since discovering they have that hobby in common. I once observed them spend an entire afternoon restoring a vintage hunting rifle without speaking a single word and they seemed to be having the time of their life.

With Carlisle he has bonded over their shared 'I am a tired parent and barely have a clue what I am doing' energy.

Esme and Rosalie he simply adores. With his police instincts he quickly sniffed out their abusive pasts, and after getting a slightly edited version of their stories out of them he regularly has a little chat with them to make sure they know they can always come to him if they need help. While the thought of two vampires needing my human father for protection is quite hilarious, they both find it extremely endearing of him.

When dad leaves for work the women in question wish him a very nice day and tell him to be careful. I roll my eyes but tell my dad I love him and then pack my vampires into a car to drive them to a drugstore out of town where we can browse without the Forks people ogling us.

Esme gets herself enough supplies to last her a while, plus some extras presumably for Rosalie in case she too gets her period. Then on the way to drop me off at school we formulate a plan to tell the others. This will be necessary, as apparently vampires can smell if someone is on their period. I try very hard not to think too much about how they have been able to smell that on me all along.

It is particularly hard to keep a straight face in the classes I share with Edward today. Thankfully they are few in number, as after our breakup he changed his schedule around to avoid me. Clearly he can tell something is up, and almost seems tempted to ask, but he doesn't and still can't read it in my mind.

Jasper calls during lunch break to move the plans we had to visit the library in Port Angeles this afternoon to later this week. He explains that he wants to be there when Edward and Alice come home in case them finding out turns into a fight. Unfortunately, I had forgotten just how good the vampire hearing is. When I see Alice's head shoot up to glare at me I know she has been able to hear the other end of my phone conversation even across the busy cafetaria. She and Edward disappear, not to be seen for the rest of the day.

In the end it is Jasper who picks me up from school after all. On the way to the library he vaguely explains what happened at the Cullen house. I am never told what exactly was said during the confrontation, but I know it was really, really bad. I know because the result is edward and Alice 'going on an extended trip to Denali to cool down'. It would take a hell of a lot for Carlisle to kick any of his children out of the house even temporarily, and more for Esme.

Over the next few days I notice Rosalie eating more and more human food. I have a sneaking suspicion what this is about. She puts on a brave face, but by Friday she cracks.

Thankfully Jasper had felt the breakdown coming so we had made sure to get Rosalie alone with us at my house. We are cooking, and she stares at the open carton of eggs on the counter. There is one plushy little dawn feather stuck to one of the eggs, and it seems to be reminding her of her own lack of fertile eggs.

"Oh Bella.", she breaks down in my arms. "I still haven't got my period."

I hold her tightly and Jasper moves closer to rub her back.

"When Esme... I was so hopeful that I would finally feel like a real woman again. But nothing has happened. I have been on the processed blood diet for weeks longer than she has, I have been eating so much human food. But nothing! I must be broken." She is full on sobbing now.

Jasper of course knows exactly what to say. He doesn't talk much, but when he does he does he has a way with words. "Shhh Rose, you are not broken. You are Emmett's wife, Carlisle and Esme's daughter, our sister. Your womanhood is not defined by biology, but by how you love us and we love you." Unfairly smooth.

I don't know if it is our reassurances or the tendrils of calm emanating from Jasper that soothe her, but eventually her hysterics ebb away. Hopefully this will be a temporary setback, Rosalie had been doing so well since starting the processed blood diet.

At least we will be there for her.