THEY KEPT HER IN THE HOSPITAL FOR SIX MORE DAYS. I COULD TELL THE time seemed interminable to her. She was anxious to get back to normal life, to be free of the doctors who poked and prodded, to have all the needles out of her skin.
For me, the time sped by, despite the constant agony of seeing her in the hospital bed, of knowing she was in pain and there was nothing I could do to alleviate any of it. This time was my secured time; it would be undeniably wrong to leave when she was still broken. I wanted to stretch out every second, even though they hurt. But they raced by me.I hated the minutes I had to be away from her, while the doctors consulted with Bella and Renée, though it was easy enough to eavesdrop from the stairwell. Perhaps it was better sometimes; I couldn’t always control my face.That first day after she awoke, for example, when Dr. Sadarangani enthused over the X-rays, pleased at how clean the breaks were, how neatly they would heal, all I could see in that moment was the tracker’s foot descending onto her leg. All I could hear was the crisp snap of her bones. It was good that no one could see my face then.She saw that her mother was restless—uneasy about a long-term substitute job at a Jacksonville primary school that would be given away if she wasn’t available soon—but still determined to be with Bella while she was in Phoenix. It wasn’t particularly hard for Bella to convince Renée she was just fine and that Renée should go back to Florida. Her mother left two days before we did.Bella was on the phone with Charlie often, especially after Renée left, and now that the danger was past, now that he’d had time to consider all the angles, he was beginning to be angry. Not at Bella, of course not. His anger was pointed in the right direction. After all, none of this would have happened if not for me. His burgeoning friendship with Alice confused the issue for him, but I was sure what I would read in his quiet brain upon my return.I tried to avoid more serious conversations with Bella. It was easier than I expected. We were rarely alone—even after Renée left, a constant influx of nurses and doctors took her place—and Bella was often drowsy from the medications. She seemed content enough that I was near. She didn’t beg me again for guarantees. But at times I felt sure I saw the doubt in her eyes. I wished I could erase that doubt, that I could mean my promises, but it was better not to speak than to lie again.And then, so quickly, we were arranging transport home.Charlie’s plan was that Bella would fly home with Carlisle while Alice and I drove the truck back to Washington. Carlisle fielded that call; we needed no discussion for him to know my opinion on the subject. He convinced Charlie that Alice and I had missed too much school already, and Charlie was unable to argue with him. We would fly home together. Carlisle would ship the truck home. He promised Charlie this was easy to arrange and not at all expensive.How different it was, returning to the same airport where my worst nightmare had begun. We flew out after dark, so the glass ceilings above were no longer a danger. I wondered what Bella saw when she looked at these wide halls—did she think of the pain and terror of the last time she was here, too? No longer racing, we moved slowly, Alice pushing Bella in her wheelchair so that I could walk beside her, holding her hand. As I had expected, Bella didn’t like needing the chair, nor the curious glances thrown her way. Now and then she scowled at her thick, white cast as if she wanted to tear it off with her bare hands, but she never complained aloud.She slept on the flight, and quietly murmured my name in her dreams. It would have been so easy to ignore the past and allow myself to relive our one perfect day, to stay in a time when the sound of my name on her lips didn’t burn with guilt and omens. But the looming separation was too sharp to allow for fantasy.Charlie met us at SeaTac, though it was after eleven and the drive back to Forks would take him nearly four hours. Both Carlisle and Alice had tried to talk him out of it, but I understood. And, though his thoughts were just as clouded as before, it was still obvious that I was right. He’d come to put the blame in the right place.Not that he harbored any dark suspicions that I’d shoved her down the stairs myself, but rather he felt that Bella would never have acted so impulsively if I hadn’t goaded her to it. Though he had a mistaken idea of what had driven Bella to Arizona, he wasn’t wrong about the central assumption. It was ultimately my fault.It should have been a long drive behind Charlie’s police car, dutifully going exactly the speed limit, but the time was still moving too quickly. Even being temporarily separated from her did nothing to slow down those hours.We all settled into the new routine with minimal delays. Alice took over as nurse and lady-in-waiting, and Charlie could not adequately express his gratitude. Bella, too, though embarrassed that she needed someone to help her with her most basic and intimate needs, was glad that someone was Alice. It was as if during those few days in Phoenix, Alice’s vision of Bella as her best friend had come fully to fruition. They were so at ease with each other—already flush with a plethora of inside jokes and confidences—as if they’d been companions for many years rather than just weeks. Charlie occasionally watched in confusion, wondering why Bella had never revealed their close connection, but he was too thankful for Alice, as well as charmed by her, to aggressively pursue answers. He was just happy with this, the best possible version of having a grievously injured daughter to care for. Alice was at the Swan house nearly as often as I was, though much more visible to Charlie during her time there.Bella had been conflicted about school.“On the one hand,” she’d told me, “I just want things back to normal. And I don’t want to get more behind.” It was very early the second morning after our return—she’d been sleeping so much in the day that her schedule was reversed. “On the other, the thought of everyone looking at me while I’m in that thing…” She glared menacingly toward the innocent wheelchair folded beside the bed.“If I could carry you at school, I would, but…”She sighed. “That probably wouldn’t help with the staring.”“Probably not. However, while you have never appreciated the fact that I am actually frightening, I promise you I can do something about any staring.”“How?”“I’ll show you.”“Now I’m curious. So back to school ASAP.”“Whatever you want.”I flinched internally as soon as the words were out. I’d been careful not to say anything that would bring up our conversation in the hospital for rehashing, but she let my comment pass this time.In fact, she seemed just as unwilling as I was to talk about the future. I thought this was probably why having things “back to normal” seemed appealing to her. Perhaps she hoped we could forget this episode as though it had merely been one bad chapter, rather than the foreshadowing to the only possible conclusion.It was easy to make good on that unimportant promise. On her first day back, as I wheeled her from class to class, all I had to do was make eye contact with anyone who seemed too interested. A slight narrowing of my eyes, a tiny curl of my upper lip, and any gawkers were quickly persuaded to focus elsewhere.Bella was unconvinced. “I’m not sure you’re doing anything really. I’m just not very exciting. I shouldn’t have worried.”As quickly as Carlisle would allow, she traded in her plaster cast for a walking cast and a pair of crutches. I preferred the chair. It was hard to watch her struggle with the crutches, to be unable to help, but she seemed relieved to be moving under her own power again. After a few days, she grew less awkward.The story circulating through the school was wrong on all counts. Bella’s disastrous fall through the hotel window was common knowledge, first spread by Charlie’s deputies around the community. But Charlie had been more taciturn about why Bella was in Phoenix. So Jessica Stanley had filled in the gaps—Bella and I had gone to Phoenix together for me to meet her mother. Jessica insinuated this was because our relationship was becoming very serious. Everyone accepted her version; most had already forgotten where the tale had originated.Jessica was left to her own invention for this gossip, as Bella rarely spent much time with her out of class. It was no different than when I’d stopped the van in the very beginning—Bella knew how to be tight-lipped when she wanted to be. And now she sat at our table, with Alice, Jasper, and me. Even with Emmett and Rosalie absent—they pretended to eat outside now, hiding in the car if sunlight threatened—none of the humans braved our presence to join Bella. I didn’t like that she was becoming alienated from her former friends, especially Angela, but I assumed that eventually things would go back to how they’d been before I’d intruded on her life.After we were gone.Though the time never really slowed, the routine started to feel normal, and I had to keep my guard up. Sometimes I would slip; she would smile up at me and I would be inundated by that sense of rightness, the feeling that the two of us were designed to be together. It was hard to remember that this feeling, so pure and strong, was a lie. Hard to remember, until she twisted her torso too sharply and winced at her healing ribs, or put her foot down too hard and gasped, or moved her wrist just so and the pale, shiny new scar across the heel of her hand caught the light.Bella healed and time passed. I clung to each second.Alice had a new scheme that would disrupt the routine, to her mind in a pleasant way. Knowing Bella would object, at first I resisted. But then the more I considered, the more I saw things from a different perspective.Not Alice’s perspective. Alice’s motivations were probably at least seventy percent selfish; she loved a makeover. My own I judged to be around ten percent. Yes, this was a memory that I wanted to have. I’d admitted that to myself. However, my main motive was to modify one specific chapter in Bella’s future. It was for her sake that I went along with Alice’s bizarre plan.I had a vision—not like Alice, not a true prophecy. It was just a probable scenario. This vision created an intense kind of ache throughout my entire body; it was half agony and half pleasure.I envisioned Bella twenty years from now, maturing gracefully into middle age. Like her mother, she would hold on to the image of youth longer than most, but when the lines came, they would not mar her beauty. I imagined her somewhere sunny in a pretty but simple house that was, unless she changed her ways significantly, filled with clutter. Adding to the clutter would be children, two or three. Maybe one boy with Charlie’s curly hair and smile, and a girl who, like Bella, took after her mother.I did not try to picture their father, or think about how his face might be reflected in her children; that was all agony.One day when they were young adolescents, younger than Bella was now, perhaps prompted by a teenage rom-com on TV (though Alice had told me that the consumption of media would change quite a bit in the next decade; she was waiting for certain companies to form so she could invest in them), one of the children would ask Bella what her high school prom was like.Bella would smile and say, “I wasn’t really into dances. I didn’t go to prom.” And the children would be dissatisfied. Their mother never had any good stories about her teenage years. Hadn’t she ever done anything interesting?Bella would have no funny, lighthearted stories, just a dearth of normal experience, just secrecy and danger and tales so fantastical she might one day wonder whether they had ever been more than her imagination.Or… Bella could laugh when her child asked, and her eyes would suddenly seem far away.“It was crazy,” she would say. “I didn’t really want to go, you know I’m no dancer. But my lunatic best friend kidnapped me for a makeover and my boyfriend took me over my protests. It wasn’t so bad in the end. I’m glad I went. At the very least to see the decorations—they were like a budget version of the movie Carrie. No, you can’t watch Carrie. Not yet.”So it was for that moment in Bella’s future that I’d allowed Alice to go through with her pushy and somewhat intrusive plan. More than allowed it, I’d aided and abetted.And this was how I found myself in a tuxedo—chosen by Alice, naturally; at least I hadn’t had to do any of the shopping—a spray of freesia in my hands, waiting at the base of the stairs for Alice’s big reveal.I’d seen it all in her head, but she didn’t care. She wanted every trite scene from the dramatic pageant that was a human prom.Alice had given Charlie a heads-up that Bella would be out late, making it clear that she, Alice, would be an integral part of the evening from start to finish. Charlie never objected to anything involving Alice. He often objected to things that involved me, though usually only in his own mind.I listened as Alice helped Bella hobble toward the stairs, Alice’s arm around Bella’s waist, Bella’s arm over Alice’s shoulder, leaning on her heavily. Bella had become fairly adept with her crutch but Alice had taken it away from her for tonight. I wasn’t sure how much of that was for the aesthetic, and how much was to keep Bella from trying to escape. Then, a few steps from the edge of the stairs, Alice squirmed out of Bella’s hold and urged her to continue alone.“What?” Bella protested. “I can’t walk in this.”“It’s just a few steps. You’ll manage. I don’t look right, I’ll mess up the picture.”“What picture?” Bella’s voice rose half an octave. “There better not be anyone taking pictures of me!”“No one’s taking any pictures. I just meant the mental picture. Calm down.”“Mental picture? Who’s going to see?”“Just Edward.”Well, that worked. Alice noted that Bella’s eyes lit up at the mention of my name, and that she moved with an eagerness absent through the entirety of the hair and makeup session. Alice was a little miffed about that.Bella moved slowly and awkwardly into view, eyes searching for me.I’d seen the dress in Alice’s head, but not like this. The thin chiffon was ruched and ruffled to provide a semblance of modesty, but it still clung to her skin in a very distracting way. The design exposed her alabaster shoulders, then fell graceful and sheer down her arms to fold in at her wrists. The body of the dress was gathered in an asymmetrical line that gave her shape subtle hourglass contours.Of course it was deep blue in color; Alice had noticed my preference.On one foot, Bella wore a blue satin shoe with a stiletto heel and long ribbons wrapped up her leg to hold it in place. On the other foot, her dingy walking cast. I was a little surprised Alice hadn’t painted that blue to match.I stared at Bella while she stared, wide-eyed, at me.“Wow,” she said.“Indeed,” I agreed, appraising her gown in an obvious way.She glanced down and blushed. Then she shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Well, this is me in a dress.I knew Alice liked the idea of Bella descending the stairway grandly, but she’d already realized that was just a fantasy. I darted up the stairs to meet her. After securing the flowers into her hair—Alice had left one spot free from cascading curls for just this purpose—I lifted Bella into my arms. She was used to this by now. I carried her a lot of places when no one human was there to see.It was faster, of course, but it was also simply a relief to hold her close. To feel that she was safe and protected for this moment.“Have fun,” Alice called, darting back to her room. She was in her own dress before I’d finished carrying Bella down the stairs. I could hear Rosalie and the others waiting for her—some patiently, some not so much—in the garage. Alice paused to draw on a few stripes of theatrical eyeliner.I brought Bella to the Volvo and settled her carefully into the passenger seat, making sure all her chiffon and ribbons were tucked out of the way of the door. I was surprised by her silence. Now, and before. She’d complained to Alice about being made up, but she’d never voiced any objections to the dance.I got into the driver’s seat and we headed down the driveway.“At what point exactly are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked, putting more annoyance in her voice than there was in her expression.I examined her face, looking for the joke. Aside from the put-on crabby attitude, she seemed in earnest. I couldn’t quite believe she was so oblivious.“I’m shocked that you haven’t figured it out yet,” I answered with a grin, playing along. Because she had to be teasing.She drew in a sudden breath, and I looked for the reason. She was just staring at me.“I did mention that you looked very nice, didn’t I?” she asked.I thought her earlier wow had probably conveyed that.“Yes.