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I was only aware of this exchange with the lesser part of my concentration. The greater part was riveted on the person in the mirror.
"Who is that?" I said, the bells of my voice suddenly too bright.
Edward's smile took on a tinge of concern. "It's you, Bella. Just as beautiful as you've always been."
I looked at her again, the alien creature in the glass. She was... beautiful, I supposed, as beautiful as Alice or Esme, the sort of face that it wouldn't surprise me to see selling makeup or perfumes. I stepped closer, and she stepped in time with me, until we stood only an arm's length away from the mirror.
My eyes scanned her face: it was so symmetrical that it looked almost computer-generated, only the fall of her hair breaking up the oval. She had high cheekbones (the hunger, I supposed, that had preceded my death and her creation; I remembered the idea of hunger), but there was no colour there, no sign that she had caught the sun on her cheeks or her brows.
(I could remember how I had once looked, I thought. As pale as I had been, there had been pink in my cheeks. This woman looked as if she had been drawn on paper, but someone had forgotten to colour her in.)
Her features were all smooth planes; she did not have the little scar beneath my ear from where I'd fallen off my bike aged six, the little beauty spot on my right temple.
And her eyes.
I had been told that newborns had eyes this colour, but I knew my eyes, knew them brown and warm, knew them well from all of the times I had peered close to a mirror in an attempt to put on makeup. Eyes were unique, I had read once, the pattern of the iris specific to one person.
Where were my eyes?
Horror started to swell in me, spilling out over the other thoughts that flitted through my head, but I could not tear my eyes away from her. Her hair was the same, perhaps -- as if it had been freshly washed and styled, but I could see it there. And perhaps her lips, the upper one a little full, looked like mine had.
(But every fraction of every inch of this woman's appearance was burning into my brain, indelible, and I found myself questioning my human memories. I was sure I had brown eyes once, and a mole on my temple, but the mirror in front of me showed otherwise.)
She was standing still. Too still. A picture painted on the glass. She didn't blink, didn't move, didn't even have the rise and fall of her chest or the movement of a pulse in her neck. A statue, one well-made in capturing a predator ready to spring, but nothing more.
Dead. Motionless.
My eyes fell to her flat stomach, and instinctively I clutched at mine. Now she moved: mocking, she made the same gesture, cradling her flat middle as I tried to seek out something that should have been there and was not. I remembered a shape that was not this one, a curve beneath my hand.
A pregnancy? A child? It was like trying to clutch at a dream, but I could feel the shape of something in my old memories. A name danced on the tip of my tongue, but I could not form it.
All the while the woman in the mirror watched me, impassive and unblinking, as I tried to recapture what I had lost.