Folktale

Chapter 33

Edward's P.O.V

I don't know how long I stand there in the middle of the hall, but by the time Carlisle pulled me back into the waiting room, everyone else was here. Word had already spread throughout Forks like wildfire. Nurses and staff try to tell me how sorry they are, how they're going to pray for us and that everything is going to be okay. I get hugged, everything but it's all a daze as I cannot get out of my head the image of Bella being rolled away.

When I do look up, I see Angela and Ben had joined as well. Rosalie is crying in Emmett's arms, Charlie talking to Carlisle, Jacob with Angela and Ben filling them in. Alice is the only one who walks up to me with a bag in her hand.

"I've brought you clothes," she said.

Clothes? Why do I need clothes?

She must see the question in my expression and looks down at my shirt. I follow her suit and see my blue button-down shirt covered in blood. For a moment, a brief moment, I hoped I was the one who was shot. That this whole thing was a nightmare, a hallucination from the blood loss and hope that the moment I touched my abdomen, I will feel the bullet hole. But I don't.

The blood on my clothes is Bella's.

Alice takes my arm and leads me down the hall to the men's bathroom. She doesn't seem to mind how the other men in the bathroom give her a weird look, she just gives me the bag of clothes and points to an empty stall. I take quickly change, feeling as though the blood was acid burning into my skin.

When I walk out, Alice is at the skin wetting a small towel.

"Come here." She takes my hand and walks me to the sink and starts wiping my face. I take a quick look at the mirror. My face looks as if it has been sprinkled with blood and my hands... My hands are all red. My eyes are swollen. "It's okay," she says. "It's okay, it's just a little blood."

"She lost a lot of blood... She was so pale."

"And they're doing everything they can to make sure she's okay," she assures me. "Esme stayed behind with Toby and Charlie went to the station but this directly impacts his daughter, there's nothing he can do, but that man has been arrested."

I look at Alice, confused by the fact that she's here, that she brought me clothes, that she's here in the men's bathroom with me, wiping away Bella's blood from my face and hands. Why?

"I thought you hated me." 

Alice sighs. "I never hated you."

"But you made it clear in high school that you weren't particularly fond of me."

Alice stops what she's doing and says, "I never hated you. I hated the change that you brought into my life." She leans on the sink, crossing her arms over her chest. "I never dealt well with change. When Bella found you on that beach, I knew you would bring in a change. I thought maybe after someone came and claimed you, Bella would go back to normal, but that didn't happen. You stayed. And everything changed. Bella fell out of love with Jacob and in love with you, we were no longer best friends and everything I knew for as long as I could remember changed.

"I don't do well with change. Jasper and I have been together since I was fourteen, we were highschool sweethearts, and now? We're divorced and he's dating a woman named Maria he met in Port Angeles. I never thought I'd be the one who would be divorced before she was thirty. I thought that'd be Bella. That because of her rash decision making one day she would come back from wherever you whisked her away as a divorced woman and tell me you were right."

I shake my head. "She was the one who wanted to leave."

"And I've never seen her happier."

She's right. Bella was happy, we were happy... And now...