36 hours ago, Kalaloch, Washington

.

The scrap of paper is scribbled with a trembling scrawl, "Bowerman airport—10 pm," on the back, or the front, depending on which way you hold it. The other side anyhow, reads in thicker marker, "FOR SALE."

The woman must be pretty determined because she plucks it up from the windshield and is holding it in her hand when she comes knocking. He flinches when the noise gets him off the couch, ends up taking a moment to gather why exactly she's there.

"Hi," she greets quickly when he opens the front door. "I saw your ad about the Mercedes. Thought I'd come take a look at it?"

His screen door jams and wobbles noisily before he gets out of his threshold and then out onto the porch. "You saw the ad, huh?" His tone suggests he doesn't actually know what she's talking about. She just nods, and when Jacob sort of unconsciously starts heading down the driveway to where the SL is parked, she follows with her hands in her pockets.

"She's looking really good, I have to say," the woman says. "You might be asking for too little, really—Other people are gonna try to negotiate you out of your asking price, but...well, I've really been looking for one of these."

Jacob isn't really sure what he's doing, brushing some of the year's early snow off the front windshield of the still pristine-looking Benz, checking over it with his bottom lip in his mouth. He looks up finally and shoves his hands in his pockets, kicking some ice underfoot as he walks more purposefully back over to the woman with a grimace on his face.

"I'm sorry," he confesses. "I can't sell you that car."

"Are you kidding me?" the woman protests weakly. "You put in the ad...Look, I drove forty miles to look at it..."

Jacob smirks nervously, looking more directly at her now. "Alright, listen...What's your name?"

She's lively-looking, he figures single since she came in a pick-up truck with no one else in it and people rarely go to look at cars by themselves, much less this kind of car. She doesn't look quite fifty, which means she's less than a decade younger than Jacob looks. Which he feels slightly uncomfortable for even contemplating, but...

She flatly offers her name: "It's Saffron, Saffron Carter."

"No kidding?" The corner of his mouth curls up. "Your name is Saffron?"

"Yeah." She rolls her eyes a little. "I go by Sadie sometimes, so if you can't say that with a straight face..."

"Okay, Sadie, then."

He's starting to think that if he was going to sell the car, she'd be the perfect person to sell it to. He's wondering if she's a natural blonde.

"I tell you what...There's a decent restaurant a few miles west. I could buy you a nice big steak to make it up to you?" He shifts a glance to his feet and back up again before saying, "I could even...make it worth the drive, if you'd like."

She tilts her head, not exactly in a negatively scrutinizing way. "I don't even remember your name, and you're asking me for a date."

He just shrugs. "It's not my fault my name is a little more common than 'Saffron'."

She's looking him up and down quite properly now; he's cautiously optimistic that he's in just before she gives a little satisfied smile. "Let me get my purse, okay?"

She's excited about the car, alright, and in the mere four-minute drive to the River Lodge he's able to gather she knows a thing or two about classics. He's already invented a biography for her in his head: She's attractive, so "divorced" goes without saying. Father probably owned a successful business selling farm equipment; she became a salesperson for many years before being promoted as a CEO somewhere, recently quit to move to a less urban setting and needs a zippy little car to prove how much she means it. It's one of the better stories he's made up for a woman he's met that he doesn't really plan on getting to know, which means in a strange way that he really quite likes her. He even asks her enough questions to start proving him wrong by the time they're in the parking lot.

But he still does all the motions with only half the meaning, and she catches on, probably assumes she's in for a one-night stand and doesn't appear to mind. It's no difference what she thinks about his reasons for not being a good whole piece of gentleman, because the end result is probably the same.

They sit at the bar in the restaurant and she orders the least expensive steak. Shortly after they've sat down, Jacob reaches to take a book of matches from a little basket sitting by the tip glass.

It's the kind of quiet place where you hear every little thunk of a beer bottle being set down; she's half-done with her Heineken when she casts him a look that makes him realize he's become very quiet.

"So, Mr. Black," she says, having made a joke of pulling her newspaper page back out to double-check his name. "What's your deal?"

"What's my deal?" Jacob has been idly sitting forward and turning the matches over in his hand.

"What makes a guy put a car on the market and suddenly change his mind?"

"Oh. Well..." He sighs, milling it over in his mind. "A friend of mine gave me that car, actually."

"Ah."

He rests his chin on his hand, staring off at where the bartender is mixing a martini. He finally mutters, "Tomorrow is the last time I'm ever going to see her."

Sadie frowns in mild sympathy. "Where is she going?"

"Oh..." Jacob gives a sigh, a shrug, and he slips the matches into the front pocket of his jacket. "Off to her family, I guess."

His voice is distant and almost flat, and the woman next to him parrots his thoughftul posture, looking his face up and down with a sort of pleased confusion. "I'm beginning to think you're a very unusual man, Jacob Black."

Jacob chuckles. "No...Not really."

It's easy enough, but for now, it isn't really true for him. He will enjoy his date with Saffron Carter. And later tonight, maybe, she'll go home with him, but it'll all be held at arm's length by some arm that isn't his, a hazy loosening of the senses that has pulled suffocation over his life ever since he told that lie that was yes, I can do this, I am going to be alright. To this day, he can't say whether it's true. He doesn't know if he should sell the car. He can't tell which of the notions is thinner, whether his life is going to end tomorrow, or if maybe he's going to finally be able to start living.

A short time before Billy died, he mentioned to his son how many native cultures consider drowning to be the worst possible death, that it leaves its victim trapped in a kind of limbo, that it does not allow others the right chance to say goodbye. In his dreams, in his daydreams, in his lucid thoughts he sees himself plunging into the depths after Bella, a mile's struggle to the ocean floor, and not even to save her, not this time. He feels the stifling pain in his lungs and his muscles and his skin: all of this to sever the stubborn relationship of her indestructible body with itself, to separate the atoms into dust, he washes her into the world, he sets her free. This is what he tells himself, every night and every day, because his life is another thing but it is always there, this thing he has to do.

He knows that he will do it because he has done it before. It would not be the first or even the second time that his actions have defined the question of her existence; his place in her life is the same as it has ever been, to save it but never to hold it in his hands.

He remembers her as just a delicate girl in a pair of loose jeans, walking tightlipped on the beach in that hidden composure like she wanted always to just melt into the sand, and he wonders time and again if he was a teenage boy falling forever in love with a death wish. Whether he rescues her cold and choking body so that she can live to walk right into the arms of death, whether he rips her from the throes of such a monster into the half-life, she yearns always for another existence, the next existence. This is why he thinks sometimes that it can't be the end, because this is him and Bella, forever and always.

On and on, she breaks. He fixes. He gives her back.