Chapter 8

Edward's POV

I heard her heartbeat before I saw her—uneven, too fast. I was already halfway to the door when it opened. Bella stepped in first, followed closely by Carlisle. Her shoulders were drawn up, her mouth set in a hard, flat line. Her eyes didn't lift to mine.

"Hey," I said softly, stepping forward, pressing a gentle kiss to her forehead. "Did everything go okay?"

She barely nodded. "Fine."

The word was thin. Brittle. It snapped the air between us.

Carlisle offered a smile, casual and warm. "Everything went smoothly," he said, a tone of reassurance in his voice.

I turned to Bella for confirmation. I needed to hear it from her. Needed to see something in her face that matched those words.

But she was already pulling away, shaking her head faintly, her mouth opening like she might explain.

"I'm just gonna—" she said, and then stopped herself.

And then she was gone. Her footsteps thudded lightly on the stairs, one after the other, faster than they needed to be.

I stared after her, confused, my mind automatically flipping back through the past few hours. Had something gone wrong? Had she been hurt? No—Carlisle's mind was calm, no alarms, no fear. Only the echo of what I could now see on her face: dread.

Carlisle shifted beside me. I turned toward him, catching a flicker of recognition in his thoughts. A folder. A name.

And then she was coming back down.

She moved slowly this time. Almost carefully. Her arms wrapped around a thick stack of folders, edges bent and papers sticking out in all directions. They were tied together loosely with a fraying string, as though someone had made the effort once and never touched it again.

When she reached us, she didn't speak. She didn't look up. She held them out in silence. Carlisle accepted them with both hands.

And that's when I saw it.

Stamped in block letters on the front of the top folder:

Monroe Center for Youth Behavioral Health.

Everything inside me stilled. My eyes locked on the name like it had the power to burn.

Monroe.

That place had been all over the news. The reports. The lawsuits. The testimonies. Children left in rooms for days. Punishments for crying. Punishments for not crying. The facility had been condemned, shut down permanently after investigations revealed the scale of abuse—neglect, trauma, horror dressed in the language of therapy.

And she'd been there.

I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

Bella didn't wait for our reactions. She offered a quiet, "Thanks," and turned away, walking slowly back up the stairs.

Carlisle and I stood frozen, the folders heavy in his hands, and somehow heavier in the air between us.

"She must've been there for over a year," Carlisle whispered, barely audible.

I couldn't take my eyes off the stairs. "Oh, Bella," I murmured.

There were no more questions. Carlisle didn't expect a goodbye. I was already moving, one step at a time, following her.

She was sitting in the middle of the bed, exactly where I'd known I would find her. Knees bent, fingers tangled tightly in the hem of the comforter, twisting it again and again through her hands like she could wring something out of it—fear, memory, shame. Maybe all of it at once.

I moved carefully, slow enough not to startle her. The bed dipped beneath my weight as I sat beside her, angled toward her, but not too close. Not yet. Her eyes hadn't lifted, but I could see it—the raw red rim beginning to form around the edges. A swelling tide she was trying to hold back.

"I'm sorry," I said softly. Because there was nothing else to say.

She didn't look at me. Didn't blink. Just said, flatly, like she was correcting a rumor I hadn't voiced aloud, "I'm not crazy."

"Of course not," I replied without hesitation. Not because I thought she needed to hear it, but because it was the truth. One of the only solid things I could offer her.

And still, it stunned me. That anyone had ever managed to look at her—her body trembling in pain she never asked for, her voice brittle with restraint, her eyes constantly searching for a way out of herself—and not see the difference between madness and suffering. That anyone could have mistaken this agony for invention. It made me want to tear something apart.

I turned toward her more fully, watching her fingers move across the comforter again. Her breathing was shallow and uneven.

I couldn't help myself.

"Did they hurt you?" The question left me before I could reason with it, before I could soften it. My voice cracked around it. All the stories I remembered—the investigations, the grainy photos, the footage of broken kids and bolted doors—flashed through my mind.

She didn't answer right away.

Instead, her head turned slightly, just enough to face the window. Her shoulders curved inwards, fragile and folding. A single tear slid down her cheek, catching in the light as it fell.

"It doesn't matter," she whispered. "I'm always in pain. So what's the difference?"

That broke me.

A sound built in my throat, not a snarl this time, not rage—not really. It was grief. A low, guttural ache that vibrated in my chest like the echo of something breaking. I didn't know how else to contain it. I had no words for what I was feeling.

She turned to me slowly, and her face—God, her face—she looked surprised. Not at the noise, but at the fact that it had come from me. That someone was grieving for her like that. As if she wasn't used to it. As if that kind of sorrow, that kind of care, had never belonged to her before.

And maybe it hadn't.

Maybe no one had ever let themselves feel it.

My eyes dropped to the mess of folders still burned into my mind. Monroe. Those records had been held together with old string and tape, some of the corners torn, the edges warped from time. Mishandled. Like her.

My hand clenched tightly at my side. It wasn't anger—not really. It was devastation. The kind that digs its way under your ribs and nests there, clawing its way out. I felt sick. Shaking. My thoughts spiraled—names, faces, details. Were they listed in those files? Were they alive? Free? Did they sleep peacefully at night while she lay awake in the dark, thinking she was the one who'd done something wrong?

She noticed my hand.

Of course she did.

She always did.

Her fingers, still trembling slightly, reached for mine—barely a touch. Just enough to interrupt the thought before it swallowed me whole.

"I'm okay," she whispered.

But she wasn't.

She never had been.

I didn't wait. I pulled her toward me with no grace, no care for how desperate it looked. I wrapped my arms around her and pressed my face into her hair like it might steady the room, like it might quiet the noise in my head. I clung to her as if I could shield her from things that had already happened.

The thought of her in that place—so young, so small, so scared. Treated like something broken. Left to rot in silence. Left to learn how to live with pain like it was a permanent part of her.

It tore something out of me.

Because it did matter.

If someone had touched her, hurt her, reduced her to this version of herself—the one who thought survival was the same as healing—it mattered.

And the worst part was that she didn't think it did.

To her, pain was a given. Her baseline. Something she never thought to question.

And that—

That shattered me in a way I knew I could never recover.

I closed my eyes and pressed my lips into her temple, my grip tightening as though I could fuse the broken parts of her back together with nothing but proximity and sheer will. As though I could take even an ounce of it from her.

But I couldn't.

All I could do was sit in the ruin of it with her.

And wish to God I'd found her sooner.

Because It did matter.

She mattered.