Solstice

QUESTIONS

'Mom?'

I turned to see Nessie, dressed in one of Alice's Paris creations – Alice had had much more luck in dressing her niece than she ever did with me – standing at the doorway to the sitting room, her eyes troubled. I had only four pages left of Wuthering Heights, which I was rereading for the hundredth time, but it could wait. I gestured Nessie over to the couch and sat next to her, rueing the fact that Edward had gone off with Jasper and Emmett to hunt. Somehow, I didn't feel like the best advice-giver for her (or anyone): I'd had enough difficulty staying upright in my old life, let alone helping people through a maze of problems. I'd always found it difficult to know what to say – I'd never really got what made other people tick.

'Are you glad to be back?' I kept my voice light. Nessie's eyes ranged around the room which Esme had decorated for us; this new home of ours, another cottage in the depths of the forest, was very like our old one. Familiar, comfortable. Comforting.

'I don't know.' I looked over to see Nessie's eyes fixed on the rough flagstones of the sitting-room floor. Firelight leapt in the hearth, making her alabaster skin glow golden. She twisted her hands. 'I don't know what to feel right now.'

'Tell me about it,' I invited, wrapping my arm around her slender shoulders. She leant into me, twisting together strands of my long, dark hair.

'When you met Dad, how did you know?' she asked, still looking away from me.

I kept my voice light, trying to hide the overwhelming surge of feelings the memory brought back. 'I just... knew. But we didn't get on when we first met, you know.'

She leant back to look at me, her eyes widening. 'But I thought –'

'I don't know that you understand just how hard it is for vampires to go against their natures,' I told her. 'Your father makes it look so easy –'

'So do you,' Nessie objected. 'You're around Grandpa and Sue and Uncle Billy all the time.'

'I'm just very lucky,' I said lightly. No need to tell her about the time when my willpower had crumbled, and I'd nearly demolished the young boy in the bookstore. 'And the effect my blood has – had – on your father...' I sighed. 'The Volturi –' she shivered, and I held her closer '–called me his 'singer'. Because my blood sang to him: it was more intense for him than anyone else. When we first met, he actually hated me.' I chuckled, shaking my head. At the time, I had been furious and heartbroken when Edward glared at me with those hatefilled black eyes. 'He actually left Forks for a short while because of me,' I said over her gasp. 'He was very, very profoundly affected by my scent. But when he came back, he'd resolved not to hurt me, but protect me. And by that time, of course, I couldn't imagine a world without him in it.' I sighed. All the fights we'd had in the early days, all the misunderstandings... 'He saw himself as a monster,' I told her quietly. 'He thought that, in becoming a vampire, he'd lost his soul. I've been trying to disabuse him of that notion ever since.'

Edward had even done the unimaginable and gone to confession in a Catholic church, some time after the Volturi left us: he'd been unable to reconcile his overwhelming joy in having me as part of his immortal existence with his deep-seated conviction that he was eternally damned. Carlisle had mentioned that there was a vampire priest in a church in Seattle, so Edward had waited for the next grey day – so common in our part of the world – and flew off in his Aston Martin to unburden himself.

'It was quite miraculous,' he'd told me in his honey-and-velvet voice, his eyes amazed. 'In a few short words, he laid my fears about myself to rest. I came to realise that I was seeking absolution, not condemnation. I wanted to be forgiven for all those times I had played God and hunted down evildoers.' And he'd refused to say any more, even though I was unreasonably curious, even pushing for more information – something I usually never did. I hadn't gone to see the vampire priest myself, but I was tempted.