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she was feeling so needlessly guilty about. She reminded me of what it did to her when I left - what it still does to her when I leave. She feels horrible about bringing that up, but she's right. I'll never be able to make up for that, but I'll never stop trying anyway."

Jacob didn't respond for a moment, listening to the storm or digesting what he'd heard, I didn't know which.

"And the other time - when you thought she was dead?" Jacob whispered roughly.

"Yes." Edward answered a different question. "It will probably feel like that to you, won't it? The way you perceive us, you might not be able to see her as Bella anymore. But that's who she'll be."

"That's not what I asked."

Edward's voice came back fast and hard. "I can't tell you how it felt. There aren't words."

Jacob's arms flexed around me.

"But you left because you didn't want to make her a bloodsucker. You want her to be human."

Edward spoke slowly. "Jacob, from the second that I realized that I loved her, I knew there were only four possibilities. The first alternative, the best one for Bella, would be if she didn't feel as strongly for me - if she got over me and moved on. I would accept that, though it would never change the way I felt. You think of me as a . . . living stone - hard and cold. That's true. We are set the way we are, and it is very rare for us to experience a real change. When that happens, as when Bella entered my life, it is a permanent change. There's no going back. . . .

"The second alternative, the one I'd originally chosen, was to stay with her throughout her human life. It wasn't a good option for her, to waste her life with someone who couldn't be human with her, but it was the alternative I could most easily face. Knowing all along that, when she died, I would find a way to die, too. Sixty years, seventy years - it would seem like a very, very short time to me. . . . But then it proved much too dangerous for her to live in such close proximity with my world. It seemed like everything that could go wrong did. Or hung over us . . . waiting to go wrong. I was terrified that I wouldn't get those sixty years if I stayed near her while she was human.

"So I chose option three. Which turned out to be the worst mistake of my very long life, as you know. I chose to take myself out of her world, hoping to force her into the first alternative. It didn't work, and it very nearly killed us both.

"What do I have left but the fourth option? It's what she wants - at least, she thinks she does. I've been trying to delay her, to give her time to find a reason to change her mind, but she's very . . . stubborn. You know that. I'll be lucky to stretch this out a few more months. She has a horror of getting older, and her birthday is in September. . . ."

"I like option one," Jacob muttered.

Edward didn't respond.

"You know exactly how much I hate to accept this," Jacob whispered slowly, "but I can see that you do love her . . . in your way. I can't argue with that anymore.

"Given that, I don't think you should give up on the first alternative, not yet. I think there's a very good chance that she would be okay. After time. You know, if she hadn't jumped off a cliff in March . . . and if you'd waited another six months to check on her. . . . Well, you might have found her reasonably happy. I had a game plan."

Edward chuckled. "Maybe it would have worked. It was a well thought-out plan."

"Yeah." Jake sighed. "But . . . ," suddenly he was whispering so fast the words got tangled, "give me a year, bl - Edward. I really think I could make her happy. She's stubborn, no one knows that better than I do, but she's capable of healing. She would have healed before. And she could be human, with Charlie and Renée, and she could grow up, and have kids and . . . be Bella.

"You love her enough that you have to see the advantages of that plan. She thinks you're very unselfish