Midnight Sun (The Twilight Saga #5) - Stephenie Meyer Page 0,140

then darted out to leave it on the driver’s seat of Bella’s truck. I knew there was no real power to the action, but hopefully it would remind her of her promise. It did make me feel just a little bit less anxious.

15. PROBABILITY

“NOW, ALICE,” I BEGAN AS I SHUT MY DOOR.

She sighed. I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to—

“It’s not real,” I interrupted, accelerating away from the parking lot. I didn’t have to think about the road. I knew it too well. “It’s just an old vision. Before everything. Before I knew I loved her.”

In her head, it was there again, that worst of all visions—the agonizing potential that had tortured me for so many weeks, the future Alice had seen the day I’d pushed Bella out of the way of the van.

Bella’s body in my arms, twisted and white and lifeless… a ragged, blue-edged gash across her broken neck… her blood red on my lips and blazing crimson in my eyes.

The vision in Alice’s memory brought a furious snarl ripping up my throat—an involuntary response to the pain that lashed through me.

Alice froze, her eyes anxious.

It’s the same place, Alice had realized today in the cafeteria, her thoughts tinged with a horror I hadn’t understood at first.

I’d never looked beyond the ghastly central image—I could barely stand to see that much. But Alice had been examining her visions for decades longer than I. She knew how to remove her feelings from the equation, how to be impartial, how to look at the picture without flinching away from it.

Alice had been able to absorb details… like the scenery.

The gruesome tableau was set in the same meadow where I planned to take Bella tomorrow.

“It can’t still be valid. You didn’t see it again, you just remembered it.”

Alice shook her head slowly.

It’s not just a memory, Edward. I see it now.

“We’ll go somewhere else.”

In her head, backgrounds to her vision spun like whirling kaleidoscopes, changing from bright to dark and back. The foreground remained the same. I cringed away from the pictures, trying to push them from my mental eye, wishing I could blind it.

“I’ll cancel,” I said through my teeth. “She’s forgiven my broken promises before.”

The vision shimmered, wavered, and then returned to solidity, with sharp, clear edges.

Her blood is so strong to you, Edward. As you get closer to her…

“I’ll go back to keeping my distance.”

“I don’t think that will work. It didn’t before.”

“I’ll leave.”

She flinched at the agony in my voice, and the picture in her head shivered again. The seasons changed, but the central figures remained.

“It’s still there, Edward.”

“How can that be?” I snarled.

“Because if you leave, you will come back,” she said, her voice implacable.

“No,” I said. “I can stay away. I know I can.”

“You can’t,” she said calmly. “Maybe… if it was just your own pain…”

Her mind raced through a flipbook of futures. Bella’s face from a thousand different angles, always tinted gray, sunless. She was thinner, unfamiliar hollows beneath her cheekbones, deep circles under her eyes, her expression empty. One could call it lifeless—but it would only be a metaphor. Not like the other visions.

“What’s wrong? Why is she like that?”

“Because you’ve left. She’s not… doing well.”

I hated it when Alice spoke like that, in her strange present-future tense, which made it sound like the tragedy was happening right now.

“Better than other options,” I said.

“Do you really think you could leave her like that? Do you think you wouldn’t come back to check? Do you think when you saw her that way, you would be able to keep from speaking?”

As she asked her questions, I saw the answers in her head. Myself in the shadows, watching. Creeping back to Bella’s room. Seeing her suffer through a nightmare, curled into a ball, her arms tight around her chest, gasping for air even in her sleep. Alice curled in on herself, too, wrapping her arms tensely around her knees in sympathy.

Of course Alice was right. I felt an echo of the emotions that I would feel then, in this version of the future, and I knew I would come back—just to check. And then, when I saw this… I would wake her. I would not be able to watch her suffer.

The futures realigned into the same inevitable vision, only delayed a bit.

“I should never have come back,” I whispered.

What if I’d never learned to love her? What if I hadn’t known what I was missing?

Alice was shaking her head.

There were things I saw, while you