Edward's POV, some weeks earlier
There are places in this world where time forgets to pass.
The old ones—those half-buried in snow and rot, where human feet no longer tread and animals have reclaimed the threshold—are the ones I prefer. They do not ask questions. They do not demand my name. They let me sit in silence, crumbling stone pressed against my back, and pretend I do not exist.
In the Carpathian Mountains, I have found such a place.
An abandoned monastery, long since left to the frost. The monks are dust. The bells have rusted mid-swing. Ivy chokes the archways, and the wind sings dirges through the broken glass of stained windows. I sleep where they once prayed. I do not deserve prayers.
I came here after I felt her die.
The bond between us had frayed by then, stretched too thin across distance and grief. But there was a moment, a single devastating instant, when the world quieted—and I knew.
Her heart was no longer beating.
I had promised to stay away. It was the only thing I had left to give her: a life without me. A life of freedom. Of safety. I never meant for that life to end in the forest, cold and alone. My hands were not the ones that took her from the world—but the guilt is mine nonetheless.
I have not spoken her name in ten years.
But it lives in me still. A constant echo. An open wound.
Bella.
The syllables bloom like poison in my chest. Even in memory, it hurts to hold her. I have tried to let go. I have tried to lose myself in blood and wind, in snow and ruin. But grief, I've learned, is not something a vampire can starve out. It feeds as I feed. It is immortal.
I do not hunt often. When I do, I choose carefully—human men who have abandoned all humanity. I tell myself it is justice. It is not. It is vanity. Some thin illusion of control. The truth is, I am not punishing them. I am punishing myself.
The villagers call me strigoi. They whisper of me in low voices, light candles when their children fall ill. They leave offerings at the gate: garlic, coins, crude wooden crosses. I let them believe I am a myth.
I am nothing now but a ghost made of memory.
And yet—there are moments. Fleeting. Cruel.
A dream in daylight. A face in the smoke. The scent of her hair when the wind shifts just right. I close my eyes and press my forehead to the cold stone, waiting for it to pass.
Ten years, and still, I would give anything to forget her—or to see her once more.
Either would be mercy.
But mercy has never been meant for me.
…
The monastery is silent now, but I imagine once it thrummed with life—pale robed men who believed their pain was holy. They flagellated their backs and bled into bowls, convinced suffering brought them closer to God.
I do not believe in God.
But I understand the instinct.
There is something sacred about discipline, about rituals that promise absolution. Even if they are empty. Even if they are lies.
Each morning, I walk the same path. Barefoot through frostbitten corridors, the stone biting into my skin like penance. I do not need warmth. I do not need comfort. These things belong to the living. I gave them up the day I left her.
At the bell tower, I pause. There is no bell, of course. Only the rusted remnants of what once called men to prayer. I kneel. I close my eyes. I do not pray.
I remember.
Her face. Her scent. The curve of her lips when she whispered my name.
Bella.
It is not remembrance. It is resurrection.
I do not allow myself the indulgence of imagined dialogue. That would be too cruel. I keep to what I know. Her voice in fragments. Her heartbeat in my memory. The sound of her laughter, thin and soft, like a thread pulled taut across eternity.
I punish myself with these things. I count them like rosary beads.
She died because I left. Because I believed distance would protect her. As though my absence could ever be enough to undo what I had already done. I should have known. I did know. The world is not kind to fragile things. And Bella—she was never fragile. She was only human.
A brief, bright flame I held too close.
She burned. And I am what remains.
I keep her picture beneath the floorboards. One photograph, taken the summer before I left. She's sitting on the hood of her truck, barefoot, eyes narrowed against the sun. There is grease on her fingers. She's smiling.
I allow myself to look at it once a year. Always in winter. Always on the anniversary of her death.
This year, I nearly didn't.
Not because the pain has lessened. It hasn't. But because I feared what it might mean if it had. I will not survive her twice.
In the evenings, I read the same worn books the monks left behind. Latin texts, handwritten prayers, records of suffering carved in ink. I trace the words with my fingers. My mind wanders. I wonder if they, too, ever buried the memory of someone so deeply it became a cathedral of grief.
Sometimes, I think I hear her in the wind.
But it is only the mountains. Only the storm. Only the trick of memory.
I know she is gone.
And still—there is a part of me that waits.
…
The shop's bell jingled against the weight of the door, startling the shopkeeper. He looked up from behind the counter, where he was cataloguing ancient postcards and brittle paperbacks.
I must have looked like something dragged in from the woods. I hadn't washed in weeks. My shirt hung loose on my frame, the collar damp with melted snow. The cuffs were frayed. There was dirt beneath my fingernails. I hadn't spoken to another soul in eons.
The man's expression pinched in suspicion. But he said nothing.
Good. I wasn't here to talk.
I came to these places sometimes. Trinket shops. Antique stores. Odd little corners of forgotten towns. It was a ritual of a different kind—a nod to the shell of my former humanity. Touching objects. Browsing shelves. Pretending, for a moment, that I might purchase something, that I could carry it home to someone I loved.
I moved without purpose. My fingers grazed chipped porcelain, yellowed lace, rusted keys. Everything here smelled of decay, of dust and mildew and time.
I paused at a rack of folded sweaters. Most were decades old—garish colors, handmade wool, all shedding fuzz. And then—
The scent hit me like a collision.
No.
Impossible.
It wrapped around me, invisible and insistent. Sharp. Sweet. Familiar in a way that detonated something inside my chest.
Not a memory.
Present. Alive.
Her.
Bella.
My knees nearly buckled.
I lifted the sweater from the pile with trembling fingers. Ivory. Worn. The tag had been cut. There was a tiny tear near the hem.
The scent was strongest there, on the collar. Where her neck would have been. Where her skin would have touched it.
I was not hallucinating.
The fabric trembled in my grip. The shopkeeper was watching me now, his face tightened with unease. I tried to speak and found my throat closed.
I swallowed once.
Twice.
"Where did this come from?" My voice was hoarse, as though it had been months since I last used it. It had.
"My daughter order it online. It no fit."
The shopkeeper shrugged, as if that explained everything.
I stared at him. The words made sense individually, but strung together they floated in the air like a riddle I couldn't untangle.
"Online?" I echoed, voice barely above a whisper.
He nodded. "Internet. She buy old things, resell, you know?" He waved vaguely at the racks of dated coats, mismatched shoes, and VHS tapes. "From America, I think. Chicago maybe?"
Chicago.
The word burned a hole straight through me.
My hand clenched tighter around the sweater, so hard the fibers groaned. I forced myself to loosen my grip, to smooth the sleeve out like I was just inspecting it.
Don't frighten him.
Don't seem insane.
But I was insane. I must have been. Because my mind was already racing ahead—Bella in Chicago? Selling clothes online? My Bella?
She would never have left Forks. She never wanted—
But she had. Or… she hadn't. The timeline fractured under the weight of it. I didn't understand. All I knew was this scent. This undeniable thread pulling me back from the edge of ruin.
The shopkeeper was still watching me, eyes narrowed now. I realized my silence had stretched too long.
I bought the sweater with a handful of crumpled lei, barely able to keep from shaking as I handed it over. The man bagged it without a word.
I walked out into the cold with the plastic crinkling in my hand like something sacred.
Bella is alive.
The world had been grey for so long. But now—now it cracked open.
And I would find her.
I would tear the world apart if I had to.
…
The sky had darkened while I was inside. A storm hovered above the Carpathians, hanging low and ominous over the jagged spine of earth like a verdict waiting to be spoken.
I moved through the cobbled streets without direction, barely aware of my steps. The plastic bag rustled with every motion—a sacred thing desecrated by something so mundane.
When I reached the monastery, I slipped in through the side entrance. No one saw me. Or if they did, they averted their gaze. They had long since learned to treat me like a shadow—an intrusion that had taken up quiet residence in the folds of their quiet village.
I climbed the stone stairs two at a time, then through the empty corridor and into the tiny room they I stayed in—a cell in every sense of the word. Just a cot, a wooden desk, a crucifix on the wall.
The bag dropped from my hand. I crouched beside it, trembling, and pulled the sweater out like it would dissolve under my fingers. The scent hit me again, stronger in the silence.
Bella.
No—it wasn't possible. And yet it was. This wasn't some illusion conjured by memory or madness. This was chemical. Real. Alive.
I laid the sweater flat on the desk and smoothed my fingers over it like I might find answers stitched into the seams. The ivory cable knit had degraded slightly with age, a tiny snag near the front, a button now missing.
It was nothing. And it was everything.
I folded the sleeves over the chest gently, reverently, then dropped to the floor beside the desk. I stared at it in silence. For seconds. For hours.
My knees locked. My body didn't matter. Only the ache. Only the question.
How?
I hadn't spoken her name aloud in years. It felt sacrilegious to try.
"You died," I thought. "You were dead. I saw it. I dreamed it. I lived it, every second of every wasted year. And now—"
My hands balled into fists against my thighs. I welcomed the pain. Let my fingernails cut through skin. Anything to keep me anchored.
What was this? Some sick trick of fate? A punishment?
Or a second chance?
The rituals began to crumble. The shell of discipline I'd wrapped around myself—waking at dawn, kneeling for hours in silence, fasting for penance, lighting candles to gods I couldn't believe in—it cracked at the edges.
Because this changed everything.
This wasn't a memory. It was a map.
I pulled out the laptop I kept buried under the cot. It was ancient, barely functional, a monastery donation meant for scripture archiving. It whirred like an old man coughing to life. I connected to the wireless signal they'd reluctantly installed a year ago and typed with shaking hands.
"Ivory cable knit sweater resale Chicago secondhand vintage."
Pages loaded. Too slow. Not enough.
I narrowed it: "online resale platform shipping from Chicago to Romania."
Too broad.
Bella's scent was still in my lungs, winding its way around the dead spaces, shaking loose the dust. I knew her. I knew her. If she had been alive—if she had survived—she would have found something small, unintrusive, a quiet way to exist.
My fingers flew over the keys.
I searched everything. eBay, Etsy, Depop, Poshmark—any platform I could remember. Listings blurred together in front of me—sweaters that looked similar but wrong in all the ways that mattered.
No scent. No warmth. Just images, pixels, static. Not her.
I dug into the shipping histories, trawling through forums where sellers posted tips on international customs, scrolling until my vision blurred. I opened dozens of tabs, saved screenshots, zoomed in on tags and thread counts and collar shapes like a detective dissecting a crime scene.
My hands didn't stop moving.
Chicago.
The word circled like a vulture.
I searched seller locations within the U.S., then narrowed it further—Illinois, Cook County, Chicago proper. I found a seller who'd posted recently. Minimalist branding. No selfies. No frills. Just clean photos of vintage pieces laid out on soft purple bedding—sometimes marble tile.
No name. Just a username. secondmorning
I stared at it.
Morning.
Bella had always hated the cold, but she loved the early hours. The blue of the sky just before the sun rose. She once told me that dawn made everything feel possible again.
I clicked into the profile. Listings of soft flannels, high-waisted trousers, oversized blazers. Everything curated but unpretentious. Practical. Beautiful.
One particular item was marked sold—an ivory cable knit sweater.
I gripped the sides of the laptop.
There. There.
I clicked it open. The photo wasn't sharp, just a flat-lay on a carpeted floor, warm golden tones. But it was the same sweater. Same snag in the hem.
Below the listing: "Ships from: Chicago, IL."
She was there. Somehow—unbelievably—she was there.
I dropped my face into my hands and laughed, though it came out more like a choked sound. A sob or a gasp. Maybe both. My throat burned. My lungs hadn't known how to breathe this deeply in years.
Bella is alive.
Bella is alive.
And I'd let her believe she was alone.
…
I didn't pack.
There was nothing worth bringing.
The monastery was still cloaked in pre-dawn silence when I left. No one stopped me. No one would. I hadn't given anyone reason to keep me—no attachments, no explanations. I was a ghost here, and I would leave like one.
The train station was an hour's walk through frozen hills. My boots sank into the crusted snow, cracking through the silence like gunshots. The wind scraped at my face, but I welcomed it. Pain, at least, reminded me I still had a body. That I was still tethered to this cursed world.
She is alive.
The thought burned behind my eyes like an eclipse. Blinding. Consuming.
I reached the station at sunrise, and it felt like a sign. That golden hour she always loved, bleeding across the cracked concrete. I stood at the platform, shaking, a venom-based bile rising in my throat—not from hunger. From the truth clawing its way up from my chest:
I'd spent a decade mourning a lie.
A decade in self-imposed exile, punishing myself for a death that never happened.
A decade convincing myself that she was better off, that I was poison, that loving her was a sentence I could never carry without shattering her. But it didn't matter anymore.
Reality was broken.
Bella was out there, and she didn't even know she'd been erased.
I boarded the first train west. Then another. Then another.
Days bled into each other. I barely moved. I didn't feed. I barely breathed. The only thing that mattered was forward.
In dark windows I saw her reflection instead of mine.
In the rustle of a passenger's coat I heard her laugh echo faintly.
In every face on every platform I searched for her eyes.
My phone remained off, battery long dead. I didn't want the noise. Didn't want the Cullens. Didn't want Alice to interfere.
This path was mine alone.
The world had cheated me of her once. I would not let it do so again.
I reached Chicago under a sky that threatened hail.
The city pulsed around me—cars, lights, steam rising from manhole covers, sirens weaving distant cries through the night.
I hadn't been on American soil in nearly a decade.
The scent here was different. Smokier. Denser. Human, in all its variations. I stood at the edge of the station for a long time, breathing it in like penance.
And then—
A thread.
Thin.
Frayed.
But hers.
Cut through the smog and steel like starlight.
I followed.