Solstice

DILEMMA

'Bella!' Emily, heavily pregnant, gave me a light hug and fell back, her beautiful face glowing. The thin cotton of her sweater strained over her rounded stomach. Emily and Sam had been trying to have a baby since they married six years ago. At last, their efforts had been successful – almost too successful; Emily was expecting twins. There was a picture of the latest sonogram on the refrigerator door, and I gazed at it, remembering how I had felt about my own little nudger. The child I was prepared to fight and die for. 'What's wrong?' Her eyes were suddenly anxious.

'I need to speak to Sam – he's expecting me,' I mumbled, and she nodded.

'I've felt something was up since you came back from Brazil,' she told me. I leant against the kitchen counter as she started to chop onions. 'You know, they say if you hold a teaspoon in your mouth when you're cutting these, it stops you from crying.' She gestured at the onions with her knife. 'It doesn't seem to work on me.'

'Here, let me,' I told her, taking the knife from her. Emily shouldn't suffer a single thing in pregnancy or otherwise; she'd gone through enough grief in her short existence. Within seconds, I had diced the onions, making each piece precisely the same size and shape as the next. 'Shall I do the garlic, too?'

'A vampire cutting garlic?' Emily laughed, and I smiled weakly. 'Whatever next? Thank you, Bella.' She watched as I minced the eight cloves of garlic she'd laid out to a paste. Emily's pregnancy craving was garlic; Sam, who wasn't over-keen, suffered in silence. 'What's really going on, Bella?' she asked suddenly, and I moved over to the sink to wash my hands while trying to think of a way to tell her. 'Is it Jacob? Is he hurt?'

'I... don't know. I don't know how to describe what's happening –'

'Bella.' Sam, his grey t-shirt rain-darkened, stepped inside the little house and closed the door firmly behind him. He quickly crossed the floor and kissed Emily's cheek and lips with so much love, so much gentleness, that I felt like I was intruding on the most private of moments. Once upon a time, the affection between them had made me feel hollow and aching; with Edward gone off on his 'distractions', as I'd thought at the time, I had envied the couple almost too much for me to bear. Sam was fortunate that the object of his imprint adored him as much as he was obsessed with her. He squeezed my shoulder, surprising me: Sam usually stayed far away from touching vampires. 'Your voice sounded urgent on the phone. Let's sit.' He took a beer from the fridge while Emily made tea, and gestured to a chair at the small round table. 'Is it Jacob? Has he upset you?'

'Oh, no. Not me.' I wound my legs gently around the fragile chair legs, aware that I could pulverise them with the most insignificant effort. 'I don't know how to begin,' I confessed, my eyes tracing the flaws in the tabletop. 'Sam... whatever I say has to – has to – stay between us and only us, okay? No-one else can know about this. I need you to promise me.'

'I give you my word,' said Sam calmly, his face tranquil. But his fingers tightened around the neck of his beer bottle, and I could smell the sudden anxiety that wafted from his skin. 'No-one outside this room will ever learn of what you speak from me without your permission.'

'And I would never break your confidence; you know that, Bella.' Emily sat opposite me, her dark eyes filled with curiosity and a tinge of foreboding. Did she also feel that our worlds were about to alter irrevocably, that life would never be the same again?

'Then I need to know... has the object of an imprint ever rejected them?' I whispered, and Sam's eyes widened. 'Is there anything in your histories that talks about such a thing? And what happened after –'

'Wait, Bella. Renesmee has rejected Jacob?' interrupted Sam, as Emily gasped, shaking her head; her lips trembled, and she wrapped her hands around her mug as if she were trying to hold in the warmth.