iled crookedly and disentangled himself. 

I shook my head a few times, trying to clear it, and turned back to my computer. It was all 
warmed up and humming now. Well, not as much humming as groaning. 

"Tell RenÃ©e I said hello." 

"Sure thing." 

I scanned through RenÃ©e's e-mail, shaking my head now and then at some of the dippier 
things she'd done. I was just as entertained and horrified as the first time I'd read this. It was 
so like my mother to forget exactly how paralyzed she was by heights until she was already 
strapped to a parachute and a dive instructor. I felt a little frustrated with Phil, her husband 

 

of almost two years, for allowing that one. I would have taken better care of her. I knew her 
so much better. 

You have to let them go their own way eventually, I reminded myself. You have to let them 
have their own life. . . . 

I'd spent most of my life taking care of RenÃ©e, patiently guiding her away from her craziest 
plans, good-naturedly enduring the ones I couldn't talk her out of. I'd always been indulgent 
with my mom, amused by her, even a little condescending to her. I saw her cornucopia of 
mistakes and laughed privately to myself. Scatterbrained RenÃ©e. 

I was a very different person from my mother. Someone thoughtful and cautious. The 
responsible one, the grown-up. That's how I saw myself. That was the person I knew. 

With the blood still pounding in my head from Edward's kiss, I couldn't help but think of my 
mother's most life-altering mistake. Silly and romantic, getting married fresh out of high 
school to a man she barely knew, then producing me a year later. She'd always promised me 
that she had no regrets, that I was the best gift her life had ever given her. And yet she'd 
drilled it into me over and over - smart people took marriage seriously. Mature people went 
to college and started careers before they got deeply involved in a relationship. She knew I 
would never be as thoughtless and goofy and small-town as she'd been. . . . 

I gritted my teeth and tried to concentrate as I answered her letter. 

Then I hit her parting line and remembered why I'd neglected to write sooner. 

You haven't said anything about Jacob in a long time, she'd written. What's he up to these 
days? 

Charlie was prompting her, I was sure. 

I sighed and typed quickly, tucking the answer to her question between two less sensitive 
paragraphs. 

Jacob is fine, I guess. I don't see him much; he spends most of his time with a pack of his 
friends down at La Push these days. 

Smiling wryly to myself, I added Edward's greeting and hit "send." 

I didn't realize that Edward was standing silently behind me again until after I'd turned off 
the computer and shoved away from the desk. I was about to scold him for reading over my 
shoulder when I realized that he wasn't paying any attention to me. He was examining a flat 
black box with wires curling crookedly away from the main square in a way that didn't look 
healthy for whatever it was. After a second, I recognized the car stereo Emmett, Rosalie, and 
Jasper had given me for my last birthday. I'd forgotten about the birthday presents hiding 
under a growing pile of dust on the floor of my closet. 

 

"What did you do to this?" he asked in a horrorstruck voice. 

"It didn't want to come out of the dashboard." 

"So you felt the need to torture it?" 

"You know how I am with tools. No pain was inflicted intentionally." 

He shook his head, his face a mask of faux tragedy. "You killed it." 

I shrugged. "Oh, well." 

"It would hurt their feelings if they saw this," he said. "I guess it's a good thing that you've 
been on house arrest. I'll have to get another one in place before they notice." 

"Thanks, but I don't need a fancy stereo." 

"It's not for your sake that I'm going to replace it." 

I sighed. 

"You didn't get much good out of your birthday presents last year," he said in a disgruntled 
voice. Suddenly, he was fanning himself with a stiff rectangle of paper. 

I didn't answer, for fear my voice would shake. My disastrous eighteenth birthday - with all 
its far-reaching consequences - wasn't something I cared to remember, and I was surprised 
that he would bring it up. He was even more sensitive about it than I was. 

"Do you realize these are about to expire?" he asked, holding the paper out to me. It was 
another present - the voucher for airplane tickets that Esme and Carlisle had given me so that 
I could visit RenÃ©e in Florida. 

I took a deep breath and answered in a flat voice. "No. I'd forgotten all about them, actually." 

His expression was carefully bright and positive; there was no trace of any deep emotion as 
he continued. "Well, we still have a little time. You've been liberated . . . and we have no 
plans this weekend, as you refuse to go to the prom with me." He grinned. "Why not 
celebrate your freedom this way?" 

I gasped. "By going to Florida?" 

"You did say something about the continental U.S. being allowable." 

I glared at him, suspicious, trying to understand where this had come from. 

"Well?" he demanded. "Are we going to see RenÃ©e or not?" 

"Charlie will never allow it." 

 

"Charlie can't keep you from visiting your mother. She still has primary custody." 

"Nobody has custody of me. I'm an adult." 

He flashed a brilliant smile. "Exactly." 

I thought it over for a short minute before deciding that it wasn't worth the fight. Charlie 
would be furious - not that I was going to see RenÃ©e, but that Edward was going with me. 
Charlie wouldn't speak to me for months, and I'd probably end up grounded again. It was 
definitely smarter not to even bring it up. Maybe in a few weeks, as a graduation favor or 
something. 

But the idea of seeing my mother now, not weeks from now, was hard to resist. It had been 
so long since I'd seen RenÃ©e. And even longer since I'd seen her under pleasant 
circumstances. The last time I'd been with her in Phoenix, I'd spent the whole time in a 
hospital bed. The last time she'd come here, I'd been more or less catatonic. Not exactly the 
best memories to leave her with. 

And maybe, if she saw how happy I was with Edward, she would tell Charlie to ease up. 

Edward scrutinized my face while I deliberated. 

I sighed. "Not this weekend." 

"Why not?" 

"I don't want to fight with Charlie. Not so soon after he's forgiven me." 

His eyebrows pulled together. "I think this weekend is perfect," he muttered. 

I shook my head. "Another time." 

"You aren't the only one who's been trapped in this house, you know." He frowned at me. 

Suspicion returned. This kind of behavior was unlike him. He was always so impossibly 
selfless; I knew it was making me spoiled. 

"You can go anywhere you want," I pointed out. 

"The outside world holds no interest for me without you." 

I rolled my eyes at the hyperbole. 

"I'm serious," he said. 

"Let's take the outside world slowly, all right? For example, we could start with a movie in 
Port Angeles. . . ." 

 

He groaned. "Never mind. We'll talk about it later." 

"There's nothing left to talk about." 

He shrugged. 

"Okay, then, new subject," I said. I'd almost forgotten my worries about this afternoon - had 
that been his intention? "What did Alice see today at lunch?" 

My eyes were fixed on his face as I spoke, measuring his reaction. 

His expression was composed; there was only the slightest hardening of his topaz eyes. 
"She's been seeing Jasper in a strange place, somewhere in the southwest, she thinks, near his 
former . . . family. But he has no conscious intentions to go back." He sighed. "It's got her 
worried." 

"Oh." That was nothing close to what I'd been expecting. But of course it made sense that 
Alice would be watching out for Jasper's future. He was her soul mate, her true other half, 
though they weren't as flamboyant about their relationship as Rosalie and Emmett were. 
"Why didn't you tell me before?" 

"I didn't realize you'd noticed," he said. "It's probably nothing important, in any case." 

My imagination was sadly out of control. I'd taken a perfectly normal afternoon and twisted 
it until it looked like Edward was going out of his way to keep things from me. I needed 
therapy. 

We went downstairs to work on our homework, just in case Charlie showed up early. 
Edward finished in minutes; I slogged laboriously through my calculus until I decided it was 
time to fix Charlie's dinner. Edward helped, making faces every so often at the raw 
ingredients - human food was mildly repulsive to him. I made stroganoff from Grandma 
Swan's recipe, because I was sucking up. It wasn't one of my favorites, but it would please 
Charlie. 

Charlie seemed to already be in a good mood when he got home. He didn't even go out of his 
way to be rude to Edward. Edward excused himself from eating with us, as usual. The sound 
of the nightly news drifted from the front room, but I doubted Edward was really watching. 

After forcing down three helpings, Charlie kicked his feet up on the spare chair and folded 
his hands contentedly across his distended stomach. 

"That was great, Bells." 

"I'm glad you liked it. How was work?" He'd been eating with too much concentration for 
me to make conversation before. 

"Sort of slow. Well, dead slow really. Mark and I played cards for a good part of the 

 

afternoon," he admitted with a grin. "I won, nineteen hands to seven. And then I was on the 
phone with Billy for a while." 

I tried to keep my expression the same. "How is he?" 

"Good, good. His joints are bothering him a little." 

"Oh. That's too bad." 

"Yeah. He invited us down to visit this weekend. He was thinking of having the Clearwaters 
and the Uleys over too. Sort of a playoff party. . . ." 

"Huh,