Lips of an Angel

Chapter 34-Past Meets Present

A/N

I couldn't resist this. I just couldn't. Don't tell me it's not realistic -- this woman means a lot to Bella, and she has done so for a very long time. This is probably the best gift she could give her. So enjoy it!

Lucy xX

***

It had been Jasper's idea to do this, and, for several days during which I was blatantly ignoring anything to do with Tanya, I'd toyed with the idea. Eventually, I'd dismissed it. I couldn't. What if she actually recognised me? What if her memory was as near-perfect as it had been when I'd last met her, many decades ago?

But when Edward had approached me, accompanied by Rosalie, with a load of research, a marriage certificate, and an address, I'd been unable to resist. It hadn't taken me long to locate an email address, and, after a few days of communication, she'd agreed to see me.

So, after finding a pair of dark brown contact lenses to imitate my eye colour from when I was human, myself and Edward drove into London, and drew up outside a medium-sized, ordinary-looking house. For several seconds, I stayed perfectly still, just staring at the place, running over my story in my mind.

I was pretending to be my own relative. It was just a couple of years ago that I'd inherited from myself, pretending to be my own long-lost relative, and now here I was pretending to do it again. But this time, I wasn't entirely sure I'd be able to control myself.

It had been three weeks since we'd defeated Paul's pack and the Volturi and Tanya in one clean sweep. Edward's eyes had continued to lighten, and were now a dull orange. Needless to say, he too had donned a pair of green contact lenses. Catching sight of his eyes made my heart ache in my chest at all that had happened since I'd first met Edward Cullen.

Edward clasped my hand silently over the console, and, with a sigh, I squeezed back. Taking a deep breath, I swung myself out of the car, and, hand in hand with Edward, walked up the steps of the porch and rang the doorbell. I forced myself to appear as human as possible for this meeting. The elderly always seemed more sensitive to our vampiric status, and this woman was, according to my own memory and the official records Rosalie had managed to dig up, eighty years old.

A couple of minutes later, the front door was opened. A tall, slender woman appeared in the doorway, and I took her in. She was slightly hunched, her face wrinkled, her eyes a little squinted, and her hair grey, but at the same time, she was clearly the same woman I'd known. Her facial features were the same, and her lips were curved up in a smile. She was still, sadly, taller than I, despite our physical difference in age, and even at her age, she held clear traces of her former beauty.

"Angela," I said, smiling widely as I took in the now-elderly face of the young woman I'd known throughout my human life.

"You must be Bella and Edward," Angela said, smiling too. "Come in."

We followed her through the house and into the living room, where a man who looked of a similar age to her sat. Jasper had been right, it seemed. The mysterious admirer the two of us had giggled about as young women was indeed Ben Cheney, and it seemed that their relationship had lasted. For that man was certainly Ben.

"Take a seat." She gestured to the sofa, and the two of us sat down obediently. "This is my husband, Ben."

"Hello," Ben said, smiling.

We greeted him politely.

"You're a relative of Charles Swan, then?" Angela asked.

I nodded. "I believe he was my grandmother's uncle, yes."

"He did have a brother, I think," Angela acknowledged with a nod. "Though I never knew that side of the family very well. Their relationship wasn't too great, Charlie and his brother."