The sun gradually rose over the forest between La Push and Forks, but the faint light did not wake Bella. Her eyelids, crusted shut by the half-frozen, salty remnants of her tears from the middle of the night, only cracked open when someone knocked on the driver's side window.
"Hello," a woman's voice called. "Is someone in there?"
Bella took in her surroundings. Her breath was visible in front of her, her hands and feet were numb, her joints screamed in protest as she painstakingly sat up. The windshield and windows of the truck were covered in ice. Whoever was outside was rubbing their sleeve against the window, trying to look inside. Bella wiped her eyes, the freezing temperature of her fingers against her face helped her jolt into full consciousness. She sat up and shifted into the driver's seat, then opened the door, fighting the iced-over exterior.
"Oh, my god," the woman said, startled by the door flying open. "Are you alright?"
"Um, yes. I'm fine."
"Did your truck break down?"
"No, I pulled over."
The woman's eyes narrowed. "Were you drinking?"
"No." Surprisingly, the woman seemed to believe her.
"Oh, good."
The woman was bundled up well against the frigid morning. A knit hat and scarf, a thick coat that reached her knees, gloves, insulated pants, and winter boots. Every single item of clothing was a different color or pattern. In Bella's mind, she saw Alice's horrified expression.
"You're Isabella Swan, right?" The woman asked.
Bella did not roll her eyes, but in her mind, she responded: really? This again? "Just Bella."
She extended a hand, covered with a hot pink glove. Bella shook it weakly, her fingers stiff from the cold. "I'm Julia."
"Nice to meet you," Bella responded mechanically.
Julia shoved her hand back in her coat pocket and rocked back on her heels. Bella guessed she was around Charlie's age. Shallow lines cut into the light brown skin around her eyes and mouth, the two braids escaping from her hat streaked with gray. Someone's mom, Bella guessed, anxious about the semi-catatonic person they found half-frozen on the side of the road. Bella tried to bring herself back to reality, but her mind felt like it was floating.
"We're going mushroom hunting," Julia informed her. She jerked her thumb back towards the SUV idling on the other side of the road, "my mom and I."
"Oh, cool."
Julia and Bella both looked at the other car when the driver's window rolled down. An older woman leaned across the console. She shouted something in Spanish too fast for Bella to follow. Julia responded, equally incomprehensibly, so much for four years of foreign language classes in high school. The woman in the car waved her hand towards Bella and continued speaking, Bella shifted in her seat. Julia turned back towards her.
"Are you alright to get home?"
"Yea, I'm fine." Bella's voice sounded frail, floating on the cold air around them.
"Okay," Julia responded skeptically, "drive safe."
"Sure, sure. Thank you." Bella turned to face the steering wheel.
"Let the engine warm up before you start driving."
Again, Bella nodded, her throat burning. Jacob had always hated when she drove with the truck still cold. Julia stood in the opened door and watched Bella turn the key. The engine's roar echoed through the frosted trees on either side of the road. Apparently deciding to trust Bella's vehicle, Julia closed the door, looked both ways down the empty highway, and dashed over to her car.
Bella turned the heater up to blasting, and pressed her icy hands against the vents. Feeling returned to her feet with a burning, sharp pain, like stepping into a steaming bathtub. The windshield slowly defrosted, melted water expanding upwards from the dashboard. The road and forest slowly clarified in front of her, everything seemed unnaturally still. Not even a breeze to rustle the branches, just a gray sky hanging over a world covered in a thin layer of ice. The sun was just beginning to peak over the eastern horizon, lighting the sky between the evergreen treetops.
Once Bella could turn on the windshield wipers to clear her view, and breathe without seeing her exhales in the air, and move her fingers and toes, she shifted into drive and pulled out onto the road. She didn't pass another car until she reached the main street of Forks. All of the businesses were closed for New Year's Day. The only people she passed on the road were a family walking their dog, the mother holding the leash while the father carried a sleepy toddler on his back. Bella had no idea what time it was, with her car still missing a radio, but winter sunrises came late in the morning in Forks. She sent up a hopeless plea that Charlie would've worked late enough to still be asleep.
No luck when she pulled into the driveway. The lights were on, the curtains open. Bella turned off the truck and unfastened her seatbelt. Dread sank in her stomach, the task of telling Charlie slamming into her like a train. He would be worried about her again, and disappointed. In Charlie's reality with no vampires or magic or imprinting, Jacob and Bella together must have seemed so inevitable, the natural progression of their childhood friendship. Briefly, Bella considered going inside and lying right to his face, letting him hear the story from Billy or Harry. She looked at herself in the mirror and realized that plan could never work. Her hair was a disaster, her cheeks and nose were still red from the cold. The skin under her eyes was swollen from crying and dark from the terrible night's sleep.
Bella rallied and left the warm safety of her truck. The morning air stung against the skin of her face as she hurried up the steps and staggered through the front door. Charlie stood from the couch and walked over, cornering her while she removed her coat and shoes.
"Did you spend the night down at La Push?" He questioned.
"Yea." Charlie was only in his 40's, and healthy, but Bella feared for his heart if she told the truth about spending the night in her truck on the side of the road.
"Well, I'd like a heads-up, next time," Charlie said gruffly, "so I don't have to wonder where you are."
"It won't happen again, Dad," Bella said, too harshly, and now Charlie raised an eyebrow, concern spreading over his face. She shifted her gaze from his eyes to his chest and clenched her fists. "Jacob and I broke up."
For a moment, they were frozen. Then Charlie said, "you…broke up?"
Bella's eyes had already been watering from the cold outside, now the tears threatened to spill. Her voice cracked, "yea."
"What happened?"
Bella could only imagine the theories spinning in his head. Inevitably, he would find a way to blame Edward for this misery too. So she told him the truth. "Jacob met someone else."
"What?" Charlie growled. "He cheated on you?"
"No, nothing like that." Bella was abruptly exhausted, and very cold.
"So, what? He finds another girl and you get dumped like trash aga–"
"Dad, I really don't want to talk about this right now."
Bella was already pushing past him, leaving Charlie like an enraged statue behind her. The combination of shock, anger, and betrayal seemed to weld him to the spot as he watched Bella flee up the stairs. She stopped in her bedroom only long enough to grab her pajamas, then went into the bathroom and locked the door. She turned on the shower, then stripped to her skin. Looking at herself in the mirror, she rotated her arm until the little tattoo was visible. The black ink contrasted sharply against her milky skin, which Bella liked. The hole in her chest throbbed, so familiar it was almost comforting. Bella ran her thumb over the design until the room was too steamy to see herself in the mirror.
When she bent over to grab her shampoo bottle from the edge of the tub, Bella slipped. The tile wall came rushing towards her and she only saved herself a cracked skull by falling, with precious little control, to her knees. The urge to curl up beneath the warm spray was tempting, but she rushed to finish and climb into bed rather than giving in. As she changed into her pajamas, Charlie's raised voice downstairs sent a wave of deja vu over Bella. Nearly a year earlier, Jacob's joining the pack had temporarily shattered their friendship, and Charlie had called Billy demanding answers. She felt a sick sort of fascination, that somehow so much had changed, yet everything felt the same.
Bella cracked the bathroom door, sending a whiff of strawberry-scented steam into the hall, and listened.
"-second time he's sent her home crying, what the hell am I supposed to think about that, Billy?!"
Charlie's footsteps paced the short distance the phone cord allowed him to move.
"Is he there? I want to speak to him." Charlie's cop-voice was icy, Bella was glad he'd never directed it at her. "Where the hell is he?!...Out? Out with his new girl?...Well, when he gets back, you tell him I better not see his face until I've calmed down and if he tries to say anything to Bella other than 'I'm sorry, I broke your trust and shattered your heart, AGAIN,' he's going to spend the night in a cell."
Charlie's voice kept on rising in volume, until it reached a pinnacle, then reverted into furious hissing. Bella wondered if Billy was actually arguing with him, or just absorbing the brunt of Charlie's rage while Jacob…did whatever Jacob was doing.
When he spoke again, Charlie's voice was shaky and weak, "I can't. I can't watch her go through it all again."
Bella tiptoed across the landing into her bedroom. She turned the doorknob so the door didn't make a noise when it shut, and collapsed onto her bed. The pillowcase and back of her shirt were instantly saturated with the water from her hair, but Bella just stared up at the ceiling. The familiar shadow of the tree outside was missing in the day, now there was only the gray haze of the weak sunlight.
In the quiet, warm of her bedroom, Bella puzzled out her feelings. She wasn't going through it all again, as Charlie feared, which was a relief. Her midnight realization of the inevitable, seemingly predestined love between her and Edward had restored the connection between them. Suddenly, it no longer felt as if he'd been abruptly removed from her world, never to be found again. She could feel him, somewhere in the same world as her, as surely as if he was only gone for a weekend hunting trip with his brothers.
The sensation reminded Bella, distantly of swelteringly hot nights in Phoenix. When the landlord hadn't bothered to fix the air conditioning, despite the soaring temperature, because it was only April. Or the electricity was out, before Bella learned how to read the bills and send the checks herself. Or Bella had stayed there for summer break, because she had a job and wanted to save for college. She'd missed Charlie so much then that her hands would ache. Missed his house that was never too hot or too cold, the soft slide of his sheets against her legs when she climbed into his bed in the middle of the night. She'd always known he was out there, she could stare at her classroom's map of the United States and point to where he lived. She could always call him, or write him a letter with the stamps he gave her every visit. But she'd still felt his absence like a heavy pressure on her chest.
The pain of missing Edward was no less agonizing than the pain of losing him entirely, but it somehow felt more manageable. As if some part of herself knew there was an end in sight, all she had to do was survive until she reached the sunrise and the conclusion of the long night. There was a string attached to her chest, tying her to Edward, and for all this time she'd thought it was severed, her heart cut out along with it. But now it felt like there was a tug on the other side, and the black rot inside her chest began to surrender to something bright and alive.
Even if it took the rest of her human life, Bella trusted whatever cosmic forces had brought them together in the first place to bring them together again. Edward was strong, she knew, strong enough to resist his insatiable bloodlust every single second they'd spent together, but was he strong enough to resist this? Was anyone?
Bella resolved herself to whatever half-life she could carve out for herself in the meantime. Surprisingly, the prospect was not particularly daunting. Charlie needed her, she didn't want him to worry about her anymore. College classes to attend, a job hunt to resume, books to read and recipes to try.
In the early afternoon, Bella woke from a comatose-like nap to the decadent scent of her lasagna filling the house. Her stomach groaned with hunger, and Bella brought herself into a sitting position. The bed was still made beneath her. The topsheet folded neatly back over the comforter, tucked firmly beneath the mattress. She grabbed her book from the bedside table. The history she'd bought in Jacksonville had already joined the stacks of completed books lining the wall beneath her window. Now she was nearly finished with the recipe book, which contained enough personal anecdotes from the chef to justify reading it cover to cover rather than just browsing, like a sane person.
Charlie had reheated one of the meals she left in the freezer for him before leaving for Jacksonville. They sat together at the table, eating quietly.
He was buzzing to ask if she was okay, Bella could tell. And she knew he wouldn't believe her when she said 'yes, I'm fine'. Even if it was mostly true. At least, there was not any vortex of grief and depression threatening to pull her down, the air still felt like it had the requisite percentage of oxygen for her to breathe comfortably. The healing she'd done over her time with Jacob was still holding strong, it seemed.
"Bells," he started.
"Could you get some good shrimp somewhere?" Bella cut him off, flipping to the page in her cookbook/memoir, "I have a recipe I want to try."
Charlie blinked. "It's not the season for shrimp."
Bella chewed on her lip, flipped the pages again. "Hmm, do we have Redfish here? Or catfish?"
"Not really," he replied warily, "but you could probably substitute salmon or rainbow trout just fine."
Bella nodded, used her pencil to write a small note in the margin of the page.
Over the next several days, Charlie was obviously extremely suspicious of Bella's stable mood. She felt slightly guilty, because the poor man must have felt like he was sharing a house with a ticking time bomb. But she wasn't sure how to appear any more fine, content, absolutely no risk of catatonic depressive episodes. There was still pain, but now it just felt like something she needed to live with, rather than something that actively threatened to kill her with every breath.
On January 2, Bella arrived at the library approximately two minutes after they reopened from the holidays. The front desk was unoccupied, whoever was working cluttering around in the office as the coffee pot hissed.
Bella had already finished nearly a third of the Forks Community Library's non-fiction selection, which consisted of a whopping three shelves, each of them only coming up to her chest. She fully expected to be rereading before the end of the year, unless she wanted to return to fiction, which was daunting, or transition into the shelf of Christian theology and Self-Help books, which was unappealing.
As Mrs. Lerond swiped her selections across the scanner, she asked Bella, "Did you enjoy your holidays?"
"Yea, it was nice, Jacob and I went down to Jacksonville to spend Christmas with my mom," she said, and instantly regretted mentioning Jacob. The inconvenience of the whole thing was dawning on her, she would have to tell people, because everyone in this tiny town had known all of her business for her entire life.
"Oh, I bet it was nice and warm," Mrs. Lerond said, her scanning pace slowing considerably.
"Yep, shorts and t-shirts on Christmas Day."
"Sounds wonderful," she sighed, "we had snow, which the grandkids were happy about. But this is my seventy-second Christmas, and most of them have been spent here where it's always cold and gloomy."
"You deserve a tropical Christmas at least once," Bella said.
"Maybe next year I can talk everyone into a cruise."
"Get it for yourself at least," Bella encouraged, "as a gift."
Mrs. Lerond shook her shoulders coltishly and resumed her slow scanning. Bella smiled at her.
"Will you be starting classes in Port Angeles now?" The woman asked, abrupt in the way only older people who were convinced they didn't have long left could.
"Yea," Bella replied, "Introduction to Economics and Business 101."
"Oh, that's great!" The older woman said, "I guess we won't be seeing you so much anymore."
"Maybe not."
"We have audiobooks on tape, if you want something for the drive."
"I'll take a look next time," Bella said, though there was still a hole in her dashboard where her radio should be, and she knew there would be no lack of time for reading. With no boyfriend or semi-job to take up the time between her two reliable activities - school and cooking Charlie's dinner - her schedule was wide open.
Over the next few days, Charlie continued to regard her as if she might crumble into despair at the drop of a pin. When he returned to work in the evening to find her lying on the couch with her book, Walking in the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, resting over her face, he rushed over to her and demanded to know what was wrong. She'd responded dumbly "just something in my book," because she couldn't find the words to express her feelings, reading John Lewis' account of the time he and his friend had been locked inside a restaurant while the owner turned on the fumigator to gas them with fungicide, because they tried to order food at a Whites-only restaurant. Part of it was a hot, debilitating fear, that history was always more interesting and horrifying than fiction, and there was still infinitely more danger in the world than the majority of humans realized.
The dreams that haunted Bella now were more the most practical nightmares she'd had in years. All red-eyed vampies that chased her through mirrored hallways and none of the lonely, dark forest. When the Cullens left, she'd been too miserable to think much about the world of danger they'd shown her. And once she recovered from the misery, she found herself under the protection of a pack of werewolves, all of whom insisted they were more than capable of dealing with any murderous vampires that came their way. But now she felt utterly alone in a world of monsters.
Bella tried not to give any voice to the fears, except to tell herself Edward would feel them too, and it would drive him back to her even faster than the grief of separation.
Thoughts of Edward and his family simmered in Bella's mind constantly. The habit of forcing them out of her mind was quickly broken as she cherished the memories she had. Dozens of times a day, she wondered what he would think of this or that. At the grocery store, she wondered if Edward had ever heard the song playing over the scratchy speakers. When Charlie had a football game on the TV, Bella wondered if Emmett was getting his beloved sports matches, wherever the Cullens were in the world.
The clouds couldn't decide between snow and rain, and she wondered if the Cullens had settled in another rainy place like Forks. When she asked her search engine 'Where are the rainiest places on Earth?' it only left her more curious. Did the Cullens move stay within the United States, or even North America? How much time did they need between locations to keep their fake identities from bumping into each other? Would they eventually come back to Forks, in another eighty years?
The evening before Bella's first day of college classes, she was in her room, fighting with her wardrobe as if it would miraculously surrender the perfect outfit for the occasion, when she once again heard Charlie shouting downstairs.
"Get the hell out of here!" His angry voice rang up the stairs.
Bella's first thought was Edward, he's back! But the illusion faded quickly. Partially because he would not have timed their reunion so randomly with Charlie home, and partially because if he had, Charlie wouldn't be shouting because he'd be too busy loading his gun. Jacob, it seemed, had said something that at least earned him the benefit of not having the door slammed in his face.
Rather than hovering in her bedroom, this time Bella walked down the stairs. The pair of them stared at her, Jacob still hovering on the porch and the front door barely open. Charlie's face was stricken, maybe he'd been hoping she would stay upstairs in her room, but Jacob looked relieved that she hadn't.
"Bella," Charlie said, "just go back upstairs, you don't have to talk to him."
"Dad, it's okay. We'll go talk outside."
Jacob's face relaxed despite Charlie's angry grumbling as Bella pulled on her shoes and coat.
The night outside was cold against Bella's exposed skin, and eerily still. Frigid mist hovered in the air, making little points of moisture on Bella's eyelashes. Jacob stepped off the porch to give her space, and Bella pulled the front door shut behind her.
"Thanks, Bella," Jacob said, when she'd descended the porch step to his level.
Bella felt Charlie's eyes burrowing into her back through the frosted window. His protectiveness was endearing, if misplaced, but Bella did not want to have this conversation with her father shamelessly watching. "Let's go for a walk."
"Sure," Jacob agreed.
They slowly made their way across the damp lawn to the road, dimly lit with the orange glow of streetlights every fifty feet or so. Jacob was walking intentionally sluggishly as Bella carefully picked her way over tree roots and stray pebbles from the gravel driveway. He walked far enough away that she wouldn't have touched him if she reached her arm towards him, and still, the distance felt too close. The memories of their relationship, and all its intimacies, felt so far removed from Bella's current state of mind she could barely recognize them. Like all the past year had been a dream, and she'd just woken up and remembered her reality.
Surprising, then, was the lingering sting from the loss of Jacob. It was nothing compared to the agony of missing Edward, of course. The prick of a needle next to having a broadsword driven into her chest. But still, she'd loved Jacob, with the small piece of herself that was still able to love anyone besides Edward, and now that piece of her had been shattered too.
Once they passed the edge of Charlie's property and were out of his view from the house, Jacob spoke, "I came to apologize."
"Jacob…" she stared.
"No, please. Everyone has already told me it's not my fault, I don't need to hear it from you, too."
Bella kept her eyes fixed on the pavement. "I was going to say, I don't need your apology, because I know you're not truly sorry."
"W-what?" He blustered.
"Maybe you are, for the way things ended," Bella said, "but would you really do anything differently? Would you choose not to imprint on her?"
When she cast a look at Jacob, his mouth was hanging open. "It's not a choice, Bella."
"I know." Bella continued walking.
He followed. "Bella, I am sorry for hurting you."
"I'm okay, Jacob," she said. "Don't worry about it."
"How can I not worry about it?" His voice tightened. "I love you, Bella."
"Don't say that, please," Bella turned to face him, stopping midway between two lights, where the road was darkest.
"You were saying it too a week ago!"
"A lot has changed in a week."
Jacob's massive body slumped, he swallowed. "Yea, I guess it has."
The sadness, written so obviously across his face, momentarily stunned Bella. Then she began to understand. She'd watched the aftermath of this exact situation play out between Sam, Emily, and Leah, but they were all much further along in their recovery from the initial disaster. Jacob had found his soulmate, his world had realigned around her and his love for Bella probably now seemed as feeble as Bella's love for him. But he still remembered, as she did, and now he wasn't just reconciling with the fact of losing her to mystical forces beyond his control, but also with the idea that he'd never really had her in the first place.
"I don't want you to feel bad about any of it, really Jake," Bella said. "I just want to move on from all of this."
Jacob scuffed his foot against a loose bit of asphalt. "Maybe we would've been better off staying best friends."
He said it so casually, his voice sweet with fond amusement, like highschool sweethearts and a thirty-year reunion recounting their youthful moments of rebellion. All at once, rage flared in Bella's chest. For so long, she'd turned herself inside out to be as close to a real, perfect girlfriend as she could manage, and in one sentence he'd written off all the pain she'd put herself through for him. She'd glued the broken pieces of herself back together, slicing the insides of herself open with every breath so the shards never cut him. Maybe they'd both given Jacob too much credit, for standing next to her and holding the glue.
"Yea, probably," she said through gritted teeth.
"I hope we can go back to how things used to be."
Bella erupted. "How can we go back to being friends now?!"
Her mind whirled with the memories of their kisses, their naked bodies pressed together, and a hundred iterations of 'I love you' as they bared their incomplete souls to one another.
Jacob raised his hands, trying to calm her. "I just meant, one day, I hope we can be friendly again. Without all this stuff getting in the way."
"Do you know what I hope for, Jacob? I hope that you and her are very happy together, and I hope I never have to set eyes on the pair of you together! I hope you stay away from me, because I would've been your best friend for the rest of my life, if you hadn't fallen in love with ME FIRST!" Her volume increased until she was shouting, her words echoing through the silent trees surrounding them.
Jacob took his hands out of the pockets of his jacket and clenched his fists. "Don't blame me for this, you fell in love with me too!"
Still, somewhere deep in her chest, Bella didn't want to hurt him. There was nothing to gain from that. So she just glared instead of shouting You didn't give me the choice to do anything else!
But Jacob was angry now too. His eyes watered and his voice cracked as he ranted, "you fell in love with me, and I watched you fight it all the time. Because you're still in love with that bloodsucker even though he's been gone for years and I was a living, breathing person right in front of you!"
They just stared at each other then, their breaths fogging in the air between them. Bella didn't argue against his point, they both knew any denial would have been a lie. Jacob broke first, his head moving unconsciously to look west, towards La Push, where Agnes was no doubt waiting for him to finish this conversation so they could continue into their happy ending.
Bella looked back towards Charlie's house. "I think now you know how it feels."
Jacob responded shakily, "yea."
"Let's not spend any more time pretending that's how it was for us."
They walked back towards Charlie's house in silence, and only for convenience, because Jacob had parked his car on the curb. He turned on the engine and pulled onto the street before Bella even reached the porch. Charlie opened the door for her, anxiety written clearly over his features.
Once she'd removed her outdoor gear, he pulled her into a warm hug. The familiar comfort of his embrace made the back of her eyes prickle. His hand crackled the back of her head, and for a few moments, the soft texture of his shirt and cedar scent of his chest made up her entire world.
"Aww, baby," he whispered, so soft and weak Bella was sure he hadn't meant to say it aloud.
She pulled away and looked up at him. He looked like a man preparing to storm a castle, all dread and terror layered over determination. "Dad, really, it's okay."
He did not believe her, obviously. How could she explain everything to him? That Jacob Black couldn't really hurt her, because she'd never cared about him enough for losing him to impact her. That this situation was not the repeat he feared, because nothing could ever hurt more than Edward leaving. Nothing could even come close. Even that didn't hurt so much anymore, because she could feel the inevitability of their reunion as surely as the sunrise over the mountains the next morning.
In so many ways, Charlie lived in a different world than Bella. For him, there were no strings of fate tying people together, no magic that determined one person was meant to be with another. He lived in a world of evidence, rules, and rationality. And Bella had exerted great effort to convince herself and everyone else that she was happy with Jacob.
Charlie was already imagining it, the way his precious child's world would collapse yet again. And this time, he thought, it would be even worse. Because Bella had known and trusted Jacob her entire life, they'd grown up together and slid so easily into romance. He envisioned the way her denial would lift like a mist off the water, and she would crumble back into the half-dead state she'd been in before Jacob had put her back together. He wondered what he'd done wrong, that his kind, smart, capable, beautiful daughter was so at the mercy of men who didn't deserve her. For the millionth time, he regretted allowing her to grow up with only a part-time father.
Bella knew only her actions would calm him. When she continued to sleep without screaming night terrors, when she ate and spoke to her friends, listened to music and read her books, he would be reassured, even if he didn't understand.
She laid a hand on his arm and said the only thing she could think of to mitigate his fear, "I have to go. I'm starting college tomorrow morning and I have no idea what to wear."