Chapter Text
She shielded her eyes from the last rays of the setting sun as her deep chocolate eyes scanned the horizon. He would never mistake those beautiful eyes. Some things could never be altered by time and her eyes remained as fixed as the northern star, even when the heavens around kept rotating and swirling in constant change. As so much of the rest of her changed, her eyes always stayed the same. He gazed, transfixed from where he hid in the shadows of the forest overlooking her home in Forks.
The house, though now a cheery yellow with white trim and two bedrooms larger than it had once been, was still unmistakably the residence of the late Charlie Swan. For decades now, ever since his death, it had become the residence of the next Chief of Police, Chris Johnson, and his wife, Bella. It hadn't taken long for them to leave their rented home in Seattle and move to Forks once the house was officially theirs and Chris got hired on to fill the vacancy in the small town's police force.
Bella swept her now mostly grey hair behind her ears and pursed her wrinkled brow in thought. While her torn jeans and worn flannel shirt were eerily reminiscent of the girl he'd met in high school, the woman beneath was as changed as the house she still lived in. She bent her wide hips over her flower bed to remove another handful of weeds, she pulled her gloves higher on her hands, and picked up her clippers. She continued tending her roses and her brightly colored bed of dahlias until the last rays of the sun slipped away. Then she stood up, stretched her back with a grimace, and moved to put her tools away.
When she turned to return to her home, her eyes fell on the package waiting for her there, overflowing with curling ribbons and floral paper. She heaved a great sigh that made her chest heave beneath her flannel and she turned to face the forest again. She placed one hand on her rounded hip and glared into the tree.
"I know you are there, you know," she said in a voice full of the surety of being right. "You come here."
She stood glaring and tapped one garden-booted foot against the ground as she waited. Edward slunk out of the shadows and slowed his movements. He told himself it was to not startle her, but deep down he knew it was also to procrastinate the inevitable for as long as possible. He thrust his hands into his khaki pockets and made his way to where she stood, his eyes still staring at his feet and hesitant to meet her eyes. When he neared, he glanced a look up at her from between his lashes, as bashful as the smitten teenager he would always be.
They both considered each other in motionless silence until Edward inhaled deeply and rushed forward to kiss her warm, life-worn cheek before she could escape from him again.
"Happy birthday, Bella," he said. She blushed and batted him away and gave him "that look" again-the look he had seen on her face whenever she scolded her young children or protested her husband's extravagant shows of affection or when she feigned irritation at her adult children's surprise visits on Sunday afternoons . She fixed that look on him now, her lips pursed and her eyes vibrant.
"My birthday was two months ago," she said. "You've been leaving gifts for me every day since. I know it's you. Don't even try to deny it."
He grinned a boyish grin and pulled his hands deep into his pockets again. "I wouldn't even if I wanted to. One gift per year of your life," he said.
"So, I suppose I still have another few days to go," she said with an eye roll. "You're making sure I know just how very old I've become, as if these old bones don't feel it already."
"No, Bella, never old. Perfect, as always," he said and it was her turn to drop her eyes from his gaze.
"You are absurd," she chided. "Well, don't stay out lurking in the shadows. Come in."
She turned and placed her gloves and clippers into the chest she kept them in and she opened the front door. She gave him one glance over her back to ensure he followed. He did, silently and cautiously. He knew this was the first time she'd let him into her home since another birthday, thirty eight years in the past. He wondered if she was thinking of that day as much as he as he followed her in.
She motioned for him to sit down on the couch. This room looked nothing like it had back then, back when it was still Charlie's and not the home of Chris and Bella Johnson. The couch, now worn with years of growing children, house parties, and family holidays, was a tan leather and matched the light brown molding that encircled the room and the matched the wood floor beneath. She'd painted the room a pale, creamy yellow and used dark blue pillows to accent the couch. It was her own now and not the living room of a divorced police chief and his teenage daughter.
Edward remembered when it had been Bella's baby pictures that covered these walls-her growing from child to woman-and how he never forgave himself for the missing one. Wedged in between her early senior year and her college graduation was the place where her high school graduation picture was supposed to hang. It was his fault it never made it to that hallowed wall and every time he sat in that room after school ended, he felt the guilt and remorse hit him like a jackhammer in his gut.
He wondered if Bella ever thought of it and mourned its loss, as he had, or if she had erased those memories as surely as she had displaced him from her life.
The walls were now covered with family photographs-her children at various ages, her husband in full uniform, their wedding photo from the ranch in Montana, and pictures of both Charlie and Renee before their deaths. Edward, at one point, held an illogical wish that she would have kept one of him somewhere, but she never did and he chided himself for hoping she would. No, these walls were covered with her family and he was no longer part of it.
He heard the faucet running in the kitchen as she washed the dirt off her hands. She chattered on to him about her flowers and the weather and other trifles as if he were any other house guest or acquaintance. She poured herself a glass of ice tea and placed it on the glass coffee table. Then she excused herself to change out of her gardening clothes.
She came down the stairs in fresh, unsullied jeans and a silk lavender blouse. Then she sat on the sofa besides him with a contented sigh. She picked up her glass of tea and took a long sip and she leaned forward to place her hand on his knee and consider him with her dark brown eyes.
"Are you well, Edward?" she asked. "How is your family?"
He stifled his ironic laugh and forced himself to meet her gaze. "Small talk, Bella? Really?"
"I'm not asking out of politeness," she responded curtly. "I am asking because I want to know."
He dropped his eyes again and played with his fingers. "My family is fine. They are in British Colombia now. They are happy. They miss you and send you their love."
"And you?" she asked. "Where have you been living?"
"I've been out on my own for awhile," he answered, hoping to avoid giving her any specifics. Thankfully, she didn't press. She gave his hand a squeeze that felt so motherly he half expected her to offer him a plate of cookies and ask him about his schoolwork. He inwardly cringed and shrunk deeper into the leather of the sofa.
"My children and grandchildren want me to move closer to them in Seattle. I suppose when I am no longer able to take care of myself I will, but till then, I told them I will visit every weekend and take turns invading their houses and their families," Bella said. She released his hand and gave him a warm smile, as if she was about to tell him a very great secret. "I told them I'm too stubborn for them to tell me what to do all the time and I've lived in this house most of my life. I've spent enough time in big cities to know I don't want to go back to one. Still, we had a lovely party last weekend at a lake house and everyone was able to get off work in order to be there. It was truly a celebration. I wish Chris could have been there."
Her eyes glistened with tears, both happy and sad, as she spoke. Edward swallowed. He knew what a happy, joyous event that day had been. He'd watched it all from the shadows, as he had done for the last thirty-eight years. It was even longer if he counted the time when he'd been permitted to watch her from the daylight as an active, welcomed participant instead of lurking in the darkness as an ostracized, anonymous observer.
He'd never admit it out loud to her, but all his attempts at returning to what she called a "normal vampire life" had been short-lived and doomed to more failure than their decade-long attempt at marriage. Her attempts at a "normal human life" proved much more successful, so much so that he couldn't help the well of jealousy that bubbled up within him whenever he saw her happiness apart from him. How could she go on to thrive without him while he failed so utterly to live without her?
For the first few decades apart, he had attributed it to her weak, human emotions which were not as capable of the fierce love and loyalty that his own nature forced him to endure. However, the way she fixed herself to her husband's side despite his turbulent midlife crisis, his long battle to recovery after his first heart attack, and now, how she still mourned for him five years after his death, had all made him reconsider. Perhaps it was that her bond to Edward had not been as strong as Edward's was to her? Instead, she gave her heart all to the barely worthy Chris Johnson who Edward despised as much as he protected.
"I was going to spend the evening reading a book," Bella said to him when he failed to answer any more of her questions in depth. "Would you care to join me?"
He nodded. He didn't care what she asked him to do. The fact that she was not only willingly speaking with him but inviting him into the sacred space she dwelt in was enough to send his heart soaring. If she asked him to clean the whole house from top to bottom, he'd do it with joy, just to be welcomed within those walls again.
She didn't ask how he knew just where to go. He walked through the kitchen to the addition in back. What had once been her son's room was now a combination office and library. She'd never given up her love for reading and her library was always in need of more shelves. He'd made sure to send her a plentiful supply of both books and shelves during some of her past few birthdays. He smiled to himself when he came across gifts he recognized.
He paused his perusal of the books when he came upon the center shelf where a small set of books were set apart from all the others. He gazed in fond pride as he read the titles and "by Isabella Johnson" on each spine. He'd read them all at least ten times over, but he never stopped the rush of pleasure he felt whenever he opened one again. In those pages he felt he was, at least in part, allowed to read her mind.
He pulled down The Great Gatsby with no intention of actually reading it and brought it back to the living room. Bella now lay in a recliner with her bare feet propped up, the stained glass lamp beside the chair casting a golden light upon her pages of Persuasion. She gave him a cheery grin and pushed her reading glasses farther up her nose. She turned back to her book as he sat on the couch and opened his own. The only sound that interrupted the too comfortable silence was the turning of pages and Bella's occasional muffled laughter.
He never saw a single word on the pages he pretended to turn. He didn't care about the book. He wished to read the pages of the woman before him-her every emotion, her every glance, her every movement, so close and present he could feel her warmth from across the room.
He remembered that same expression when he used to watch her study in what had once been her bedroom and, later, when they stayed in the married student housing at Dartmouth. It was still the same, though the hair framing it was gray and short-the crease in her forehead, the way her brown eyes furled in concentration, the stillness that fell over her movements as she cast out everything else in the world to fall into the world of ink and pages.
He took it all in as a starving man at a buffet. He knew it would not last. Any moment, she would send him back out into the cold, separated from the warmth of her sun by walls and glass and a barrier more impermeable than any man-made structure.
A light chime from the mantle stirred her from her book. She closed the book, got up, and pulled out a pair of thick boots, a lantern, and coat from her closet by the front door.
"I'm going to go feed the horse," she said.
She returned a quarter of an hour later, fragrant with hay and the other scents that clung to the barn they'd built in the back of the house. She nestled into the recliner with her book again until, at half past ten, she closed her book, switched off the lamp, and bid him goodnight.
He stayed in place on the couch and gazed with unseeing eyes into the now dark room. He listened to the tell-tale signs of her bedtime ritual-sounds he had long since memorized, though from outside the house, always outside. They sounded so much closer, nearer, more real now that he was in "her" space. He closed his eyes so he could more fully bask in the rich scent that was her that permeated every wall and pillow of this home. It had shifted and aged like the finest of wines, but it was always her. He heard her bedroom door close and a silent darkness enveloped all within the little house by the forest.
"Good morning, Edward," she said and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek and disappeared into the kitchen. She ate breakfast early, as she usually did, before she bounded out the front door in her walking clothes. Three other women from the neighborhood were already waiting for her there. A chorus of female voices greeted her and they left together in a fast trot down the isolated patch of forested roadway they all called home.
Edward could hear them gossip and chirrup and share recipes and craft ideas and family drama as they walked. It was a happy gathering and, an hour later Bella returned home with her face painted with a rosy glow and her eyes bright from her exercise and companionship. Then she sat in a chair in the kitchen to call each of her children to tell them she was thinking of them.
"I'm going for a ride," she told Edward after she finished checking her email and making her calls. She didn't wait for his response, not that he had one, and she left out the back door with a bang. Not long after, he could hear the hooves of her horse galloping through the muddy field behind the house and then through the drizzly trail that led deep into the wet pine forests.
He watched at the window for her till she returned. He couldn't help it. That was the one remaining element of what she came to call her "teenage rebellion" that had stuck. While arguably a much healthier outlet than some of the pastimes she had pursued during those tumultuous days, it still left Edward uneasy. Even when she carried a pistol in her saddlebag and proved time and again to be capable of managing both her horse and herself, he still worried she would come to some harm. She had told him, many years back, she'd come to more harm if he insisted on following after her and continually spooking her horse with his predatory presence, so he let her be, and simply kept watch.
"You want me to live a 'normal human life,'" she'd told him. "Part of being a 'normal human' is the possibility of death. Keeping me wrapped in bubble wrap like a porcelain doll and drowning me in hand sanitizer won't make my life any more 'normal' or 'human'. You gotta let me make my own decisions and live with the consequences."
He'd received that lecture more than once, over the years, but it didn't help him sit any more at ease with some of the decisions she made. However, he didn't have a say in what she did, at least, not anymore.
She came back from her ride full of stories of the doe and her fawn, the family of beavers, and the ways the flowers bloomed in the forest meadows.
"That's why, no matter where I roam, I keep coming back to Forks," she said. "There's nowhere else quite so beautiful."
He chuckled inwardly at that and she caught him.
"From the woman who once hated everything about Forks," he said in answer to her unspoken question.
"People change," she replied with a slightly sad half-smile and he fell silent again.
She made herself a sandwich and went outside to the old porch swing. She gave a groan as she planted her slower, heavier frame onto the creaking swing. She plopped the pillows just right behind her and she started in on her sandwich. Edward hid in the shadows of the house, slightly behind the door frame, avoiding the eyes of the neighbors and the rare rays of the winter sun which threatened to creep closer to him.
As she finished her lunch, her head nodded slightly and then she was asleep in the sun with her head buried against one of the pillows. The shadows moved across the yard as they echoed the journey of the sun. A rabbit nibbled on the grass and a blue jay took a bath in the bird bath near the rose garden.
He watched her, as he always did when she sat on this swing. She loved this swing. Her husband and son had built it during one of their "carpentry phases" and its slightly off-kilter lean and slightly squeaky swing pattern showed it to be one of their earlier learning projects. Still, she refused, again and again, to let her son make her a new one, no matter how many times he tried to convince her.
"I love this swing," she told her son. "I'll never forget how proud you were when you first built it and when I sit here, I think of you and your father up to your arms in paint and how happy you both were. No, you may not replace this swing."
So the swing remained in all its crooked glory and Bella ate her lunch there nearly every day after her husband's last heart attack, five years back.
With a snore, Bella's head flung back upright and she gave a sleepy blink of her eyes at how the sun had moved across the sky. She yawned and stretched before she picked up her plate. She brushed past Edward as she came into the house and went straight into the kitchen. Without turning around, she spoke to Edward again for the first time in hours.
"Why are you still here?" she asked him. She clung onto the counter on both sides of the sink as if to keep herself upright and she kept her eyes fixed on the window overlooking the pasture rather than turning to face him.
He slowly approached her, as timidly as if she were a scared rabbit, and he still kept himself hidden in the shadows lest transgressing into the light might break whatever temporary spell kept him where he was.
"You haven't sent me away yet," he replied. "I'll stay until you tell me to go."
"That's not what I mean," she said. "I mean, why are you still here? Why do you send me birthday presents each year and watch over my house like a guard dog? I'm an old woman. What are you still doing hangin' around here like I'm your high school sweetheart."
"Because you are," he said. "I told you-I've always told you. I don't care how you age. You are my life. I have nowhere else I want to be."
"What do you want?" she said. She turned to face him now, her expression wary and guarded. "What are you expecting from me?"
Edward shook his head and opened and closed his mouth in uncertainty. "I just want to be near you," he said.
She snorted. "When was that ever enough for you? You always had some way I needed to change, some set of expectations I needed to adhere to. And I told you-I've always told you-there's no way this could work. You look young enough to be my grandson. How am I supposed to explain you to my family or friends? I'd be the scandal of Forks!"
"Then don't tell," he said with an elegant shrug. "I can hide and be discreet."
"No kidding. I hadn't noticed," she said with an eye roll. "So if I'm understanding you right, you're telling me you want me to treat you like my dirty little secret and you'll be fine with that?"
"Yes."
She shook her head and pursed her lips in thought. "You know, my kids, they worry about me being here alone. I told them I'd get a security system. You'll do, I suppose. I don't mind you hanging around here as long as nobody can see you. It's better to have you inside and out of the cold than creeping around the forest like you've been."
She tsk'd him when he tried to protest that and she playfully batted his shoulder.
"Don't you treat me like I don't know, Edward Cullen. You act like I'm an idiot. You forget that I was married to you...for ten years...and I know how you are. If that wasn't enough, I've raised three children and so I've grown eyes in the back of my head. I know you've been there and for a very long time. I know you've followed me worse than a baby duckling with its mama, no matter how many times I've sent you off. Now that my children are grown and I'm long since widowed, you might as well stalk me from the inside of the house instead of the outside."
He gave her a sheepish grin and nodded. "I'd be happy to stay for as long as I'm welcome."
"Like you'd leave if I told you off again," she snorted. "Well, I suppose you can use the guest bedroom if you need to keep anything here. You know the one? There's space in the dresser and the closet."
He nodded and she waved her hand around the room as if to clear it. "Good, then. I've gotta do some more emails with my publisher and work on my next book again this afternoon. I'll be in the office if you need me."
With that, she left him in the shadows of the living room, unmoving as he watched her leave. He did not know whether to rejoice in his good fortune or despair in her nonchalance. He retreated to what was now the guest room but had once been shared by her daughters and, before that, was Bella's room, back long before so much rubble lay between them.
It was refurnished, of course, and painted a warm marigold. Long, lacy, white curtains hung from the window, which had also been replaced with a slightly larger, much more securely-latching version. The only echo of what had once been was the lone rocking chair in the corner of the room where he had spent so many nights watching over his love as she slept. That was back when her long, chestnut tresses flew like wild waves around her ivory face, back when she still said his name in her sleep.
He'd continued to watch, from a distance of course, though the old tree fell over one year in a storm and was replaced with a much shorter, much less concealing apple tree. From his distant perch in a tall pine, he'd still kept a careful vigil of her. He watched as she painted that room to welcome her first child and later as the lights flicked on in the middle of the night in tandem with an infant's cry. He'd heard the arguments and bouts of temper that flared as she disciplined her rebellious teenagers and her cries as she mourned the loss of her husband after thirty one years of marriage.
Now, from the inside, looking out of that window, he wondered how many times her eyes had sought him in the darkness and if she ever thought of him as she sat in this chair. Could she feel him nearby, always waiting, always watching, always keeping vigil or was he simply an unwelcome ghost of her past that refused to be exorcised?
He spent the night rocking back and forth, back and forth in that old, wooden rocker and he waited for the sun to rise again.