This is it, people. This is the end. The monkey is off my back.

If anyone is still reading this, I send you my love and eternal thanks, as well as a slightly puzzled look. =) Seriously, this has been tremendous fun, and you have all been lovely. I wrote this for myself, but your kind words have been such a fantastic added bonus. Much love to everyone.

Mllebojangles, I can't even. You're the most wonderfullest of them all.

The characters belong to Stephenie Meyer; the writing belongs to me.

Peace out, the fandom.

15

"Here! Here! I'm open! I'm open!" cried Alice, hopping from foot to foot and waving her arms over her head.

Jasper hesitated, weighing his options, and threw the frisbee instead to Carlisle, who was being closely covered by Emmett. Predictably enough, Emmett knocked Carlisle easily aside and snatched the disc out of the air, then backhanded it like a missile to Rosalie who had coasted to the end of the yard for an easy point.

Carlisle picked himself up out of the grass, looking aggrieved. Rosalie and Emmett, despite being at a three-to-two disadvantage, were winning handily. Alice shrieked at Jasper, "I was open, you big lout!"

Edward laughed so hard that he almost snorted his milkshake out through his nose.

He and Bella sat side-by-side in adirondack chairs at the edge of the yard, watching as the rest of the Cullens played a raucous (and, frequently, rule-bending) game of ultimate – the rest of the Cullens except Esme, of course, who could only ever be found in the kitchen anymore. She had turned herself overnight into a champion-level short order cook, fulfilling Edward's every whim. Today, it was milkshakes and BLTs, served on the lawn. The day before had been pancakes for every meal. Carlisle had finally put his foot down and ended the massive influx of junk food into the house when he discovered the huge bag of Doritos stashed under Edward's bed; Esme's argument that "he should eat whatever he wants!" fizzled when she looked at the ingredients listed on the bag and didn't recognize anything as food. But that didn't preclude her from feeding him ice cream and cookies, butter and bacon and cheese to her heart's content, and meanwhile Jasper and Emmett smuggled him a steady supply of candy bars.

Edward insisted that he had ninety years of food to catch up on, including Doritos. Bella was delighted to see him eating and regaining strength, and in the meantime, she noticed that she herself was losing the gaunt and haunted look she'd developed over her weeks of vigil. There was color in her face again, and once more some roundness in her figure. She frequently caught Edward's eyes lingering there, making her cheeks flush even more with pleasure.

But for now she laughed to see him laughing, and pounded him on the back when he nearly choked on his milkshake, and munched on her BLT in the soft gray daylight. It had been nearly two weeks since he had awakened, nearly two weeks as a human.

"I wouldn't have thrown it to Alice either," Edward confided as soon as his coughing subsided. "She gets all excited and takes off running every time. Vampire brain plus the ability to see the future, and somehow she always forgets the rules of the game."

Bella laughed. On the field, the others were setting up for a new play. Esme arrived to clear away their plates from lunch, and she fussed with the blanket she had laid over Edward's lap.

Edward protested. "I'm not an invalid, Mom," he said.

Esme snorted incredulously. "I'll believe that when I see you running around out there with your brothers," she said. Edward made a face, and she kissed him on the top of his head to take the sting from her words. "This is the first day you've even been outside," she said gently. "Take it slowly, my darling. Just seeing you awake and talking is my heart's delight." She bustled away with the plates, half no-nonsense nurse, half doting mother.

Edward was quiet, watching her go. "She's been worried about you for a long time," Bella said. "She loves having this chance to make a fuss over you."

He turned back to her with a smile. "Oh, no doubt," he said lightly. "She's in mother-hen heaven. Sometimes I think she'd prefer it if I stayed weak and wobbly forever, so that she could indulge her maternal instincts in perpetuity." Bella laughed, and he grinned, but his smile dimmed as he turned back toward the yard.

On the grass, Emmett and Jasper were wrestling over the frisbee in a confused blur of vampire speed. Rosalie stood by, examining her fingernails and looking bored. Bella watched Edward carefully, but his expression was unreadable. After a long moment, he said softly, "Even when I'm up and running around with the others again, I'll never be able to keep up with them."

At times like this, the old Bella would have cringed and cried, falling over herself to apologize and self-deprecate. Instead she took his hand and waited. Edward had chosen, and he'd chosen her for a reason.

Sure enough, a moment later he turned back to her and kissed her fingers that were intertwined with his. "I don't regret what I did," he said. "I don't regret it at all."

She smiled and reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes. "I know," she said. The silken strands slid through her fingers, and she did it again for the sheer tactile pleasure of it. "But it's ok to regret it a little bit, I think," she added. "You know, for certain reasons. There are trade-offs."

"Of course," he said, his smile deepening, and he kissed her knuckles again. "But you're better than any amount of running and jumping and wrestling with my brothers."

"Mmm, I certainly hope so," she said mildly. After a moment her meaning sank in, and he truly laughed, long and unreservedly. Bella smiled as the sweet baritone echoes of his laughter washed over her like water.

"There's another kind of wrestling I'd like to try sometime," he said, smiling wickedly, his voice low. Bella felt the first stirring of desire inside her, but she let it lie. We have time, she thought. We have all the time we need.

"Let's just get you strong first," she said. "Once you can beat me at arm-wrestling, then we'll talk."

He let his head drop back against the chair. "It's so strange that I don't have to be so careful with you anymore," he said. He gave her hand an experimental squeeze, and she squeezed back. "I hated feeling like I couldn't really touch you. I hated knowing that if I forgot for one instant, I could break your arm or turn you black and blue. It was awful, always having to be so careful." His face – so open, so guileless – was troubled. Bella knew he was reliving the times when he wasn't careful, when he couldn't be careful. There was a twisted tangle of emotions there, which it would take him a long time to work through.

"Hey," said Bella, giving his arm a little shake. "That's all over now."

He looked up at her, and as always, the extraordinary green of his eyes astonished her. "Yeah," he said softly. "It's all over."

They shared that brief silence, green eyes looking into brown. Then a shout broke the spell and Edward looked out at the yard, where play had erratically resumed. Bella watched him, and he felt her watching, and didn't mind.

She studied his profile, the little bump at the bridge of his nose that she had come to love, the line of his jaw, the way his Adam's apple moved when he swallowed. It had taken him some time to build up the strength to get out of bed and walk, and she knew that he fretted about atrophied muscles and lost weight, but she thought he looked adorable: a beautiful skinny teenage boy. Looking at his broad shoulders and long limbs, she felt the desire stir in her again. She longed to climb into his lap and press her face into the side of his neck, but she took a slow breath and willed herself to wait. Vampire Edward would have sensed the acceleration of her heart, the slightest shift of her pheromones; her Edward now watched his siblings, oblivious to her fleeting hormonal turmoil. She smiled wryly to herself, grateful for this small allowance: the privacy of her own body.

As a rule, though, she didn't let her thoughts stray too far in that direction – not yet. As his body recovered, Edward could do little at night (and, honestly, for much of the day) but sleep. Carlisle and Esme, as sudden parents of a teenaged human, had proven to be unexpectedly conservative in that department, and much to Charlie's satisfaction, Bella spent her nights in her own bed at home.

Her body had its own opinions, however, and those would insist on being addressed soon. To cover an incipient grumble of frustration, she abruptly changed the subject. "Does everything still look darker to you?" she asked him.

"No, not really," he answered. "Maybe it never really looked darker. I think what I was missing was… I don't know…" He paused, struggling to explain. "Not color, not visual light exactly, but all of the other… the other layers?" He frowned. "The way I saw before, it was as if the colors and shapes of things were only one layer of the world. I could also see heat, and the way things smelled, and I knew where people were by where I heard their thoughts – they weren't really visual, all of those things, but they still made up part of my mental landscape."

Looking at him, Bella tried to imagine seeing him in all of those ways, and shook her head. "So maybe it's not that the world is darker, it's that it's less multi-dimensional," she said.

"Maybe," he said, and was silent for a long moment. Bella pulled her knees up to her chest. After a while, he spoke again. "But the way I see now, the way the colors look and the way people look, it feels… right. Already I'm beginning to forget how it was to see the other way, and when I try to remember, it just feels overwhelming."

Bella nodded slowly. She thought she could understand what he meant. She herself was already forgetting the time before his transformation, as if a great mental pivot point had been placed on the timeline of her life, dividing all of time into before the change and after the change. Everything before seemed dark, stressful, heavily fraught. Already the nights of terror and days of stomach-churning anxiety were becoming blurry in her memory. It was her mind's defense mechanism, she supposed. Selective post-traumatic amnesia.

She was also beginning to realize that she was forgetting Edward's face from before the change. She wasn't sure whether it had happened gradually, or all at once when he opened his eyes for the first time; she knew, however, that his human face had become more dear to her than all his vampire perfection had ever been. She had been at home a few days before, rifling through papers on her desk to look for something, when she had found a photograph of Edward that she'd taken before any of the madness began. It had startled her so badly that she'd sat down hard on her bed, hands trembling. The figure in the picture was beautiful, of course, beautiful and inhumanly perfect, but also, she realized for the first time, terrifying.

In a stupefying flash of alternate vision she had suddenly seen how wrong her liaison with Edward had been, a perversion of nature, the predator lying with the prey. He had wanted to drink her blood. A long shudder of revulsion worked its way through her frame, until with a jerk she snapped out of it, forcing herself to remember the wonderful things about their relationship. He had wanted her blood, but he'd also loved her; he'd fought his hunger and had been impossibly gentle with her. In the end, it had worked.

But still. She had put the picture away in a drawer, face down.

He wasn't for this world, she thought, sitting beside him on the lawn. And besides, I like mine better.

"Hmmm?" said Edward absently beside her, watching the game.

"I didn't say anything," she said.

"Oh. I thought I heard you say something."

"Nope," she answered. After a moment she looked at him sharply.

Coincidence. It had to be a coincidence.

Esme's voice interrupted her thoughts. "Bella, dear, it's almost 2:00," she said, arriving from the verandah to stand beside Edward's chair. "Dr. Wilson will be expecting you at 2:30."

"Right." Bella got up, her stomach abruptly full of butterflies. She had mentioned a few nights before that she ought to look for a job to carry her through the rest of the summer, and the next day Carlisle casually let drop that a colleague of his was interested in finding a part-time research assistant. Bella immediately protested that there were probably college students who were more qualified, to which Carlisle answered that Dr. Wilson hired a high school intern every summer and hadn't yet filled the position. Bella was skeptical, imagining a crotchety absent-minded old researcher with a beard as white as his coat, but agreed to speak with Dr. Wilson on the phone. She found to her surprise that the doctor was young, energetic-sounding, and female. The conversation had gone well, and Bella had agreed to meet her the next afternoon for something between an interview and a trial run in the lab.

Edward saw the queasy look on her face as she stood, and grinned at her. "Don't be nervous," he said. "She'll love you. You're brilliant."

Bella stooped to kiss his forehead, relishing that brief moment of contact. "And you should see how much homework you can do before I get back," she replied.

His expression soured. He hadn't finished high school with the rest of their class, and the humiliation of having to complete his degree by way of correspondence and summer school was a sore point with him. "I've already gone through high school dozens of times," he groused for the hundredth time. "I know more than all the teachers in that school put together."

"Then your homework should be easy," Bella said lightly. She leaned down again to kiss him and involuntarily lingered for a moment. His lips were warm and soft, and the smell and taste and feel of him were unutterably sweet, not from the milkshake but from something in his personal chemistry that called to her own. The instantaneous arc of attraction from her body to his whenever she kissed him never failed to stop Bella in her tracks. Reluctantly she pulled away, and there was a fully human look of hunger in his green eyes that made her heart stutter in her chest.

Esme was studiously pretending not to see, but there was a hoot from the yard, followed by Alice's elfin laughter and Rosalie saying, "Emmett, don't be an ass." Edward grinned, color rising in his cheeks. Bella had been utterly delighted when she discovered that Edward was almost as prone to blushing as she was.

Carlisle limped off the field and draped himself over Esme's shoulder. "Why these children won't play proper games is beyond me," he said. "I'm clearly too old for a game called 'ultimate.' How about some cricket for a change?"

"Oh, you're not fooling anyone," said Esme fondly.

Bella privately agreed. For all that he was a little rumpled and grass-stained, Carlisle looked the same as ever, straight and strong and capable. And that's how he's always going to be, she thought, for as long as Edward and I live. The thought was somehow simultaneously unsettling and reassuring. He seemed to feel her gaze on him, and he turned to look at her, his light gold eyes meeting hers. There was always a smile in those eyes now, just for her – a smile of kinship, of shared trauma and shared triumph.

The others were approaching. "You have to leave already, Bella?" said Jasper.

"Yeah," she said. "My first big meeting with my potential boss." The nerves fluttered back to life in her stomach.

"I'm sure it will be fine," said Emmett, bluff as always. "Right, Alice? Bella will be great."

Alice smiled sadly, then mimed zipping her lips and locking them. "Sorry, Bella," she said.

"That's ok," Bella said. This was Alice's new policy, by her own choice: she shared nothing, good or bad, that her visions showed her of Bella and Edward's future. Not with the family, not with Bella and Edward themselves, not even with Jasper. And Bella was happy with this, though sometimes the curiosity drove her wild when she caught Alice looking at her with a faraway sad glance or with sparkling eyes and a mischievous smile.

But we don't need to know, she thought. Their future would happen as it happened.

"Oh, come on," Emmett was saying. "Just a hint. It can't hurt, can it, Alice?"

Edward's forehead creased.

"Leave it, Emmett," said Rosalie, a steely edge in her voice.

Bella had not failed to see how they stood on opposite sides of the little group. The easy camaraderie of the game had already vanished, and their bodies were tense, their words to each other terse and pointed.

Edward was looking down at his hands, and to Bella, his misery was palpable. Rosalie hadn't wavered in her desire to attempt the transformation herself, and Emmett still furiously forbade it. Rosalie hadn't begun her hunger strike yet, but every day she threatened it, and Edward had told Bella that every night she and Emmett screamed at each other until the rafters shook and Carlisle forcibly separated them.

Bella put her hand on Edward's shoulder. Emmett followed the motion with his eyes, then looked into her face. She hated what she saw in his glance: anger, confusion, misery of his own.

Esme had hurriedly turned the conversation to a lighter topic. Bella squeezed Edward's shoulder and prepared to go, but as she did, she felt a nudge in her mind, a lightening of anxiety, a little wave of well-being. She looked up and met Jasper's eyes. One corner of his mouth was quirked up in a half-smile. He bobbed his head once, a greeting, a farewell.

She smiled, hoping he could read her gratitude on her face. Then she turned to go, making her way toward the corner of the house, around to where her truck was parked in the driveway.

"Bye, Bella," called Alice.

"Knock 'em dead," said Edward.

"Not literally," said Carlisle.

She turned and waved, laughing. How strange, to think that she had once felt that they were all leaving her behind, when now it seemed the opposite. They were like a gallery of statues, beautiful and unreal, and she had walked among them for a while. As she reached the corner of the house she glanced behind her. The Cullens had turned inward, speaking among themselves, but Edward was watching her go. He lifted his hand in a wave.

As if he might hear her, she thought to him, I'll always come back.

Every day Edward walked a little farther and felt a little stronger, and on a beautiful day in late August, he and Bella hiked up to the meadow. They left mid-morning before the sun had burned off the mist that clung to the forests, but as they climbed slowly above the low cloud line, the air grew warmer and drier.

It took them several hours to make the climb, stopping frequently to rest. Edward remembered the way and led them unerringly up the rough trail, but his steps got slower and slower as they went, and their cheerful conversation gradually gave way to silence and labored breathing. Just as Bella was beginning to wonder whether they had tried too much too soon, the forest lightened ahead of them, and in a few minutes more they emerged from the trees into the tiny cup-shaped valley nestled into the mountainside.

It was just as Bella remembered, ringed with dark trees, nodding with wildflowers, and full to the brim with sunlight. Overcome with emotion, she was about to clasp Edward's hand, when he staggered out into the sun, dropped his backpack with a thump, and unceremoniously flung himself to the ground, panting.

"Damn hills," he said. "I hate hills. Let's go to college somewhere without any hills."

She laughed and dropped to sit beside him in the grass. "The Midwest it is, then," she said agreeably, pulling off her backpack and digging through it. "I hear wonderful things about Nebraska."

He accepted the water bottle she handed him and drank long and deep. When he finished, he lay back with a contented sigh, one arm flung over his face against the sunlight. She lay down beside him, enjoying the sting of the bright day in eyes too long accustomed to cloud cover. After a moment Edward snaked an arm around her to pull her in, but she was hungry, so she squirmed out of his grasp.

"Lunch first," she said, finding the thin blanket she'd packed in her bag and spreading it on the grass. He groaned and rolled gracelessly onto the blanket, but when she started unpacking the food he sat up readily enough. He was always hungry now.

The trek up the hill had spurred both of their appetites, and they tore eagerly into the lunch they'd packed that morning. The sandwiches quickly disappeared, followed by the big sweet-tart apples Edward loved so much. Bella polished off her apple and pitched the core into the woods, while he was still gnawing his almost down to the pips.

She watched with a deepening smile while he hunted out the last few bites, then he flung the last shreds of core sidearm into the trees. He lay back on the blanket with a satisfied sigh. After a moment he held out his arm toward her, and she curled into his side, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

His breath was slow and steady. "The sun feels good," he said, and the sound rumbled through his chest. "Let's go to college somewhere sunny."

"Arizona," said Bella automatically. "Actually, no – I think I'd miss all the green. We could go to California."

"Or Florida," he said, beginning to smile. "We could stay with Renee and Phil."

"Ugh," said Bella with a shudder. "I thought you went to college to get away from your parents. How about the Northeast? That's sunny, right? And as far from both Charlie and Renee as I can possibly be while staying on the same continent?"

Edward laughed. "Sure – I can just see you in New England, where it's all humidity and mosquitoes in the summer and oh-god-why-have-you-forsaken-us cold in the winter. You wouldn't last a year."

"Are you calling me a wimp?"

"Maybe."

She poked him in the ribs, and he squirmed. Edward, she had discovered to her great joy, was ticklish. "I could do winter," she said. "I've always liked the idea of winter. I've never really lived anywhere with proper seasons like in books. Forks doesn't count. Rain and colder rain don't equal seasons."

He snorted a laugh, then looked down his nose at her appraisingly. "The idea of winter is quite different from the reality, you know. Imagine months of snow and ice and slush. It can be horrible."

"But then you also get heavy wool sweaters and snowball fights and hot chocolate afterwards," she replied, warming to her topic. "And snuggling up by the fireplace."

"Because so many college dorm rooms have fireplaces," he interjected.

"And I kind of like that it's so far away," she said, ignoring him. "I read a book about Boston when I was little and I've always wanted to go there. Just you and me together, a million miles away from everyone. It would be a completely new life."

"True," he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice. "Boston, huh?"

She hmmmed indistinctly into his shoulder, and they were both quiet for a moment, listening to the birds and the tiny shush of the breeze through the grass. Bella was comfortable in the stillness, but she could almost hear Edward's mind whirring with thoughts. Since his transformation, she had had to learn his silences anew. Where before he had been moody and brooding, now he was meditative, deliberative; his brain was always going a mile a minute but he was more often silent than not. Bella knew that if she waited for him, he would share what was going on behind the silence.

It would have bothered her once, she realized. His silence would have unnerved her, and she immediately would have wondered what he was thinking, whether he was happy, whether he was tired of her or annoyed by her. Those overly-analytical little voices had been blessedly silent lately. She wasn't sure what had changed, but she was happy in this new quiet confidence.

She no longer panicked when she thought about the future, either. She had positively shocked Charlie over breakfast a week or two before when she had brought the topic of college up unprompted; he had struggled to keep his nonchalant cool, but she knew he was dancing on the inside. She hadn't been able to give him any specifics; she and Edward had been joking and bantering about college – about their future – for weeks, but had never talked seriously about where or when. But just the fact that she was willing to speak about it at all was a big step forward, and Charlie had gone back to his coffee and newspaper with his moustache twitching as if he were fighting to suppress a smile.

Bella felt a strange little glow, remembering. He's proud of me, she thought.

She was proud of herself, really. Remembering the bad old days, she tried to recreate the train of thought that had once led her into a tailspin of anxiety every time she contemplated the future, and failed. Perhaps it was that moving on with her life no longer meant that her path would diverge from Edward's. Perhaps it was that they no longer hung in the impossible limbo of an untenable relationship. Perhaps it was that she no longer felt the constant low-level panic about growing old while Edward stayed perpetually frozen in time.
Perhaps it was all of these things, and perhaps it was just the sunlight and the warmth of Edward's body beside hers. She gave a sigh of contentment and nuzzled against him.

"When we go to school, what are you going to major in?" Edward asked abruptly.

A bashful flush instantly rose in her cheeks, and she hid her smile in his shoulder. "I'm nervous to tell you."

He laughed. "Why?"

"Because I am." He could have teased her, but he was mercifully quiet. She felt a rush of gratitude. "Biology," she mumbled into his side.

"What?" Delighted, he pushed himself up onto his elbow, tumbling her over onto her back. "Biology?"

"Yeah," she said, blushing worse than ever. "I don't know – I think I got a taste for it when we were studying. I'm enjoying the work I'm doing with Dr. Wilson, and I'm good at it. And when I came up with my parasite theory…" She trailed off, remembering the flash of intuition, the terrifying thrill of puzzle pieces falling together. Despite the horror of the idea, for just a moment she had felt brilliant and powerful, even if her theory had turned out not to be true. She looked away, half-embarrassed, half-defensive, wanting him to understand. "Carlisle told me I had a scientific mind. Nobody… nobody ever told me that before."

She risked a glance at his face. He was grinning ear to ear. "Knock it off," she said, though her expression was beginning to mirror his in spite of herself.

He bent and kissed her thoroughly until she was grinning just as broadly as he was. "I'm proud of you," he said. "You say it like it's something to be embarrassed about, but I think it's wonderful."

Once she would have scrambled to change the topic, to turn the spotlight away from herself, but now she basked in Edward's approval. "You don't think it's a dumb idea?"

"Of course not." He smiled warmly. "And that means we can study together. We're going to be taking a lot of the same classes."

She blinked up at him, not understanding.

"If I remember correctly, usually you have to take lots of bio classes for pre-med," he said.

"Pre-med?" She surged up to sitting. "You'll be doing pre-med? You're going to be a doctor?"

"That's the idea," he said with a crooked smile.

"You're doing it for Carlisle." She made it a statement, not a question, and he nodded.

"Not music?" she asked softly. He had begun to play his piano again in the last few weeks, haunting melodies once more spinning through the Cullens' airy house. He had been rusty at first, but as he gained strength he spent hours at the piano in single-minded concentration, and soon recovered an otherworldly virtuosity that seemed all the more miraculous now that he was merely a human boy.

His face was briefly wistful. "It's tempting," he said, "but no. I'll always have music. Carlisle gave me back my life, though. I have to do something for him. I have to make my life mean something."

She reached out and touched his cheek. "Anything you do will mean something," she said. "I can't imagine anything more meaningful than the mere fact of your presence in the world."

He smiled absently, but his eyes were thoughtful, concerned. "I've been thinking," he said hesitantly. "For next year. What do you think about – what about Chicago?"

He had been gazing out at the trees, but now he met her eyes with a worried look. "Chicago?" she said thoughtfully. "I guess I've never really thought about it." He frowned, so she added, "There are a lot of colleges there, right? Angela has a cousin who went to Northwestern, and she said he liked the city so much that he stayed there after he graduated."

"Right," Edward said. "I've… I've been thinking about the University of Chicago."

Bella's eyebrows went up. "That's a really good school," she said. "I don't know if I could get in."

He sat up hurriedly. "Of course you could," he said, "and if by some ridiculous fluke you didn't, you said it yourself – there are plenty of good schools in Chicago. Northwestern and University of Chicago are just some of the big ones. There's DePaul, and Roosevelt, and Wheaton, and Lake Forest…"

He had begun poking her in the ribs with each name, and she collapsed into giggles, trying to fight him off. At last she managed to seize his wrists and hold him away. "Okay, okay," she said helplessly, laughing. "What's the big deal with Chicago, anyway?"

He sobered instantly. "That's where I grew up."

Her laughter died. "Oh," she managed. Of course. I knew that.

She released his wrists but he turned his hands over and caught hers, intertwining their fingers. She waited, and at last he spoke. "I haven't been there in so many years. I've wanted to go back for a long time but something always stopped me. I… I didn't want to go, as… as I was." He looked away. "The University of Chicago. That's where my parents wanted me to go. Not Carlisle and Esme. My real parents."

Bella didn't know what to say. Edward never spoke about his childhood. "I've found myself thinking about them more recently. I even dreamed about them a few nights ago, and I could see them with perfect clarity. Not doing anything special – just the way they used to be. My father reading the newspaper. My mother –" His voice trembled, and he clenched his jaw. "My mother pouring tea, or writing a letter…"

Bella's heart went out to him. "I've never heard you talk about them before," she said softly.

He turned his brilliant green eyes on her searchingly. "Perhaps the memories are clearer than they used to be."

Thoughts of her venom parasite theory flashed through her mind, but she stayed silent as he continued. "I have so many memories that I didn't even realize were still there. I remember the sidewalk outside our house. There was a wrought-iron gate that squeaked no matter how many times my father oiled it. I remember where I used to play ball with the other boys on my street. I remember my school, and how time seemed to slow down as it got closer to the end of the day. I remember my nursery room – I had a hobby-horse that I used to clatter around the house with, for God's sake." Bella smiled, but her throat had closed. "And I remember a thousand conversations over the dinner table about the new university. My father was so proud that our city had such a school in it. An engine of progress, he liked to call it." Edward's mouth twisted, bitter and wry. "Back then, I used to think that his idea of progress was only the expansion of his own wallet. He wanted me to be a banker or a railroad baron or some such captain of industry. I think he liked to imagine that I would be the next Morgan or Rockefeller. I know now that they only wanted the best for me, but at the time, those conversations terrified me – my parents dreaming up brilliant futures for me. I remember how I used to feel such an awful panic whenever they brought it up – as if I didn't escape as soon as possible, my future would be a long string of offices and desks and ledgers. I couldn't bear the thought."

Bella squeezed his hands wordlessly. I know exactly what you mean.

"I just wanted to be a soldier," he said. "I thought it would be a glorious life of bravery and heroism. All we boys did, back then. But I was too young for the Great War, and I think I blamed my parents for that too. I was even ready to run off and lie about my age to enlist."

He stopped, as if the words had been cut off at their source. Around them, the sunlight, the trees, the very air seemed to pause, waiting.

"I've never told this to anyone," Edward said. "Not even Carlisle. After he turned me, after I came to terms with what I was, I wanted to put my human memories as far behind me as I could. It was a different life, and I wanted to forget it. But I've been remembering. I don't always want to, but I remember.

"My father caught me the night before my friends and I were going to run away to enlist for the army. We quarreled – fought, really – like we never had before. He thundered at me and called me a child. I said the most hurtful things I could think of. I wanted him to understand how much I despised him, how I thought he was destroying my life.

"Now, you must understand, this was 1918, the year that the Spanish flu swept across the world. Already we had been seeing it, though we didn't know it for what it was. Our housemaid had been shivering and shaking for a week, and I had heard the cook coughing in the kitchen. I didn't know it, but my father was already taken with the disease by the night that we fought. Still, weakened as he was, he was a strong man and I was a boy, and he grew so angry that he knocked me down with one blow to the face.

"I remember lying on the floor and looking up at him in utter disbelief. He had never lifted a hand to me before, never, and this was in an era when no one thought twice of striking a child as punishment. He looked down at me, then turned without saying a word and left, locking me in my room."

Edward's voice shook. "By the time my mother unlocked my door in the morning, my father had already been taken to the hospital. My mother followed soon after, and I was taken myself soon after that. I never spoke another word to my father. By the time I woke from Carlisle's bite, my parents were dead."

At last he looked up to meet Bella's eyes, and she was shocked to see the tears that trembled in his. "And that's how I staged the ultimate rebellion," he said. "My parents wanted me to be the perfect adult. I found a way never to become an adult at all."

The tears rolled down his face, and in that instant Bella broke. She reached for him, drawing him in, gathering him into her arms. "It wasn't your fault," she murmured, kissing the tracks of his tears, salt on her lips. "It wasn't your fault." He shook silently in her arms for a moment. So much time, she thought. So many things to carry, and so many hurts, over so much time.

When he pulled back after a minute, his eyes were red but his face was calm. She stroked his tousled hair back from his forehead.

"I was angry for so long," he said softly. "Angry at the world and at myself, angry at Carlisle for changing me – angry at him for even longer than I realized, long after I thought I had forgiven him. But I don't think I ever let myself grieve." He took a shuddering breath and let it out. "I'm sad for the boy I was. He's dead and gone, as surely as if he never was. And he was just a child. He was innocent." His eyes when they met hers were full of pain. "He was completely innocent in a way that I will never be again. He's gone and his life didn't mean anything."

She seized his shoulders. "It means something to me," she said fiercely. She held on to him as if she might be the only force holding him onto the earth. "Because of him, you are here. In spite of everything. You're here."

He looked up at her and smiled at last. "You're here too."

"Because of you."

His smile quirked bitterly. "In spite of me."

She shook him gently by the shoulders. "Because of you. Because of everything. I'm serious, Edward. My God, can't you see that? Can't you see how close we came?" She leaned in, holding him tightly – it was suddenly very important that he understand. "From the very start, we never should have met. We should barely even have been alive at the same time. Look – if Carlisle hadn't changed you, you would have died of influenza at the age of seventeen. Even if you had survived, you probably would have gone off to war and died in a muddy trench somewhere in France. Not to mention everything that has happened since then!" She ticked items off on her fingers. "If it had been any ordinary vampire who changed you, you might have been left to fend for yourself when you were newly turned. You might have destroyed so many human lives, and that would have destroyed you. Instead, Carlisle kept you safe. He proved that you could be the way you were, without losing your humanity or your mind. He brought your whole family together, and brought you all here to Forks. And he kept you alive through your transformation when no one else in the world could have done it! Look at the past, and there are so many places where things might have gone wrong!"

He was watching her intently now, his brilliant green eyes hungry for her words.

"It's like... it's like our lives, our whole world, is a house of cards," she said desperately. "Any slip at any point in the past might have brought the entire future crashing down. But it didn't slip. You didn't die, not of the influenza, not in the war, not when the venom went out of your body. We're still here, and that must mean that we've done something right."

Somehow they were kneeling, facing each other. His arms were around her waist. She cupped his face with her hands.

"So maybe the house of cards isn't so fragile anymore," she said softly. "Maybe we can let ourselves breathe now, because if it hasn't fallen yet, I don't think it's going to fall, ever."

The breeze gusted once, lashing her hair around them, filling their ears with the rush of close calls, of connections barely made, the howl of other worlds, other lives. Then it settled and was gone. Edward let out a shaky breath, all at once.

She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, a benediction. "It's done," she said. "I give you permission to stop punishing yourself for all the bad things that have happened to you."

He gathered her in to him and kissed her, long and deep, a kiss that went all the way through her, and suddenly it was urgent, crucial, vital that they not wait a moment longer. Perfect, she thought fleetingly, perfect how they matched, how their bodies called out to each other, how something with hormones and pheromones and mysterious intricacies of touch and taste and smell made him altogether irresistible to her, and her to him. This is why, she thought, this is why I was his singer, and then his hands were under her shirt and they fell together on the blanket, and then thought went away entirely.

It wasn't elegant or expert, but it was passionate and unmixed with sorrow or regret. It was undiscovered country, barely glimpsed before. It was surprisingly easy and unspeakably more complex. She twined her legs around him and he moaned. He licked a path of fire from her collarbone to earlobe, then grinned and bit her softly on the neck, until she shrieked with laughter.

He blushed as he reached for his discarded jeans and pulled a condom from the pocket. She blushed as she told him shyly that she'd been on the pill for months.

When he pushed inside her, she thought yes yes yes and clung to him as if clinging to life itself. He didn't last as long as he wanted to, perhaps, and she didn't come when he did, but his ecstasy was a tempest that carried her along before it, a bird on the wind. As he came panting down from his heights, he would have apologized, but she pressed her fingers to his lips and whispered that there was time enough for that later, time enough for everything.

And when he knelt between her legs and bent to kiss her there, there where she ached for him, his face was lit with pure joy, with desire so long denied, with the realization of a fantasy that would have been impossible before. Lips, tongue, fingers, teasing out the secrets at the soft core of her innermost secret self, and she was gone, arching, soaring.

They lay curled together on the blanket afterward, sweat drying on their bodies in the sunlight. Bella's head lay on Edward's chest, rising and falling with the gentle swell of his breath, and she thought she could never feel more complete. She traced the planes of his body, the delicate contours of his muscles, with her fingertips. In the clear light of day, his skin was milk and rose and gold.

"I thought you weren't going to remember me," she said, not abruptly, but as if she were picking up the thread of a long conversation. "When you woke up. I thought the venom was going to take your personality and your memories and you would wake up not remembering me."

Just like that first time, he opened his startling eyes – moss-green, forest-green, green as life – and looked into hers. "At first, I think I didn't," he said slowly. "I remember being a long way away. Or buried very deep. It was like…" He paused. "This has only happened to me once or twice since the change, but I remember it now from my human life. Do you know how it feels sometimes when you wake up from a deep sleep, and you're not exactly disoriented, but you're somehow emptied of yourself? And it takes a moment for the awareness of who you are to come back to you?" Bella nodded against his shoulder. "Well, it was like that, but so much farther. I felt completely clear, like I'd been purified by fire and everything I was had been burned away. And there wasn't even a way to find myself – not even a path, not even a light – until you looked into my eyes."

His body was warm and solid against hers, his arms tight around her, anchoring her to the earth. "But then it all came back," she said.

"Yes," he said. "It all came back."

The words rumbled through his chest, and she felt rather than heard them; felt the meaning in them, the time, the past, the layers of his life in their concentric tree-rings. For a moment she felt a hundred years old herself.

"Edward," she said. "You remember your time as a vampire?"

"I remember everything," he said in a low voice. A thread of sorrow wound its way into her heart. But then he said, "I don't think about it much anymore, though. It's like I've put those memories into a room and closed the door. The door isn't locked, the memories are all there, but… but I like the present better. It's not something I've tried to do. I think it's just the way my mind works now."

She pondered that. "Edward."

"Hmm?" His eyes were closed.

"So if you're going to go to the University of Chicago for your parents, and you're going to be a doctor for Carlisle, what are you going to do for yourself?"

He grinned without opening his eyes. "You," he said, and she laughed. "And anything I want to. We have a whole year before we're going to start school. We can travel. We can go meet the Dalai Lama. We can get a little apartment in Paris and eat bonbons all day."

She smiled against his shoulder, her heart lifting.

"Edward."

"Hmm?" A smile in his voice. She would never get tired of the sound of his name on her lips.

"You're going to get a sunburn," she said, running a hand over his pale stomach, lightly dusted with red-gold hair. "I don't think they've invented SPF ex-vampire yet."

"Har har," he said, but he rolled himself and her up in the blanket, and his hands crept to places where they'd recently been, and she shivered happily and pulled him tighter against her.

But their caresses were slower now, less purposeful, and Bella felt the sweet certainty of time stretching out before them. Wrapped up in his arms, she felt a rush of gratitude, joy bordering on awe, that he should be there with her after everything.

She lifted her head to tell him so, but stopped, because his face was twisted in a bizarre grimace, half pain, half terror. Despite the look of confusion and fear in his eyes, she didn't even have time to get concerned before his body convulsed and he sneezed, thunderously.

Just in time she dived out of the way, out of the blanket, howling with laughter.

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed. "It gets me every single time. Do have any idea how terrifying it is to have to learn to sneeze again after ninety years? Every single time, I think I'm dying."

Bella rolled helplessly on the grass, barely able to breathe with laughter.

"Well, that killed the mood," Edward said, sitting up, grinning in spite of himself.

"No, no," Bella protested, crawling back to him, still laughing, and they fell together in a tangle. They were half on the blanket, sun in their eyes, grass in their hair. He rolled her over, kissing her, and she kissed back, matching him perfectly – her hunger as deep as his, her need as strong, her heart as full.

But the breeze over them shifted, and they both felt it. It was cooler than it had been before, and it carried the first barest hints of the autumn to come. Even below Edward's warm body, Bella shivered. Edward lifted his head and looked at the sun, which had begun to dip toward the treetops in the west. The little meadow was already half in shadow.

He looked back down at her, eyes full of regret. "Esme will worry if we're late for dinner," he said.

She smiled and kissed the downturned corner of his mouth. "We still have a long walk ahead of us."

They got up, brushing grass from skin and hair, retrieving their clothes. When they were dressed, Bella folded up the blanket and stashed it in her bag. Edward took a last look around the meadow, and the deep depression they'd made in the tall grass.

When he turned back, she was smiling at him. "Ready?" she asked.

"Ready."

He held out his hand, and she took it. His was warm from the sunlight, from their lovemaking, from his own human blood rushing just below the skin.

Hand in hand, they walked down the mountain.

the end