Chapter One

"It won't be quite that terrible Renesmee," Edward smiled as he sat at the grand piano in the centre of the spacious living room, preparing to play her mother's lullaby.

Renesmee threw aside the dog eared copy of Pride and Prejudice she had been blankly staring at for the past ten minutes, it landed open and face down on the highly polished parquet floor, "Honestly Dad, do you think that you might at least try to stop listening to my thoughts? It's creepy...and just plain wrong! There are some things I don't want you to know!"

Edward pressed his lips together, trying desperately to suppress a smirk. He knew exactly how riled Renesmee became when he commented on her private thoughts; but, quite honestly, he was glad that he could hear her thoughts – what better gift could a father ask for?

"I'm sorry." He said for her benefit, his fingers moving to the keys of the piano.

Renesmee scowled darkly, "No you're not! I've never seen you so smug. It's a good thing I love you Dad..." she trailed off, threw her hands in the air and stalked from the room.

Edward sighed; he had been rather worried for Renesmee recently. The frequency with which she thought about a particular individual had spiked rather dramatically. He feared for her, as a father should – as Charlie had feared for Bella, Edward's wife and Renesmee's mother. He and Bella had always known that the time that they had to call Renesmee theirs was finite, but even so she was still their little girl. Perhaps that was what had influenced their decision to leave Forks when they did, so that they could prolong that time. They had known that leaving Forks and relocating to Alaska would have a significant impact on Renesmee's happiness; but their time in Forks had come to an end.

He vividly remembered the day that they had left: a 'fourteen' year old Renesmee had cried as if her tears sprung from an infinite source, her hands clinging to Jacob, her eyes alert to every move that he made as if the sun rose and set with him. Despite her intelligence, not one member of the Cullen family had been able to reason with her and Jacob had not helped, he had protested and issued angry threats from the moment he had discovered their plans until the day they left. Edward had tried to explain why Jacob could not come with them, but it had simply made her cling even tighter to him. Eventually, Emmett had wrestled her away while Sam, Paul and Quil had held Jacob back. The entire thing had been a debacle of epic proportions. As they had pulled away, Renesmee had shrieked as if she was being torn apart slowly. Emmett had continued to lock her in his arms to stop her thrashing about, but she had managed to get partially free; she had turned her head and stared wretchedly out of the rear window at Jake's lividly shuddering form. As they had turned the corner, leaving Jacob behind, a loud and pitiful keening sound had filled the car.

The experience had altered Renesmee, the playful and cheerful girl she had once been had diminished into someone Edward did not recognise. On the surface she was still Renesmee: taller than her mother, but she only reached her father's shoulder, warm chocolate brown eyes, an open and angelic face – her father's impossible beauty; a face that would never be able to fully disguise its emotions and bronze ringlets that hung down to the middle of her back. But the spark was gone, she was quiet and introspective. People remained drawn to her inexplicably, but she shunned their attention, preferring the company of her books, she went out from time to time and socialised, but it always seemed to Edward that she was simply going through the motions. He pressed down on the keys and began to play; Bella's lullaby always calmed him.

Renesmee stood in the centre of her bedroom, quivering with frustration; she pressed her fingers hard to her eyes. Stars burst behind her eyelids as she took deep breaths and tried to stop herself from crying. For as long as she lived, she would never come to terms with the fact that her father could hear each and every thought that she did not hide or guard against. When she had been younger, it had made her feel close to him, it had meant that they shared a connection to one another, that her father understood her. But, with the loss of innocent, childlike thoughts this had rapidly changed. Old familiar feelings overwhelmed her, she felt as though her head had been trapped in a vice, that the vice was closed tightly on her head and was getting tighter every moment. She wanted to scream as she felt the familiar weakness, the disconnection between herself and what should be the sanctuary of her mind. As the feeling and the thought entered her head, she winced. She had not thought to divert her thoughts away from this trajectory because she had been frustrated by her father's intrusion.

The sound of her mother's lullaby cut off abruptly.

Immediately, the pressure filled feeling of weakness dissipated and was quickly replaced by that other regular sensation: guilt. She felt guilty because at times like these, she resented her father's gift; she wished that her thoughts were hers alone, like her mother. She cringed at the way that her father's expressions were sometimes unguarded, particularly when her mind fixated on particular subjects, and recently, on a particular person. Truly, she only ever felt free when she was far from home...she had felt free in La Push too, with Jacob. She never needed to disguise anything with him. Downstairs, her father started to play her mother's lullaby again. The knowledge that she felt freer away from her family, from her own father caused her to feel such intense self-reproach that there had been moments when she thought that it would consume her. Since they had left Forks, she had oscillated regularly between these feelings: frustration, guilt, self-reproach. A soft knock at her door snapped her out of her introspection. She went to the door and opened it, Alice stood outside.

"Oh hey Alice..."

"Listen Ness," she said, taking hold of her arm and pulling her from the room, "We need to talk party details – the dress, the decor...everything"

"Alright," Renesmee answered.

She pushed aside her own feelings. She knew how excited Alice had been about the party – the way that she revelled in every rite of passage that Renesmee reached. She smiled at her aunt fondly and allowed her to lead the way to her and Jasper's room. Alice pulled her excitedly to the soft suede sofa in the back corner of the room, it was angled to look out over the rolling green grass that led to the icy beauty of the lake and down towards the glacier. Alice pulled her down beside her; she turned her body to face Renesmee,

"So, have you thought about your dress?" Alice asked.

Renesmee wanted to answer in the affirmative, but the truth was she had not spent a second of the last two weeks thinking of anything except...She stopped that train of thought. She had to focus.

"You haven't have you?" Alice said when she hadn't answered moments later.

"No," Renesmee admitted shamefaced.

Alice's face clouded with disappointment.

"But, I really want to choose a great one...I just don't have your style Alice, you know that. I need your guidance; you'll help me won't you?"

Renesmee watched as a sparkling smile lit up Alice's face. She knew that her aunt loved nothing more than fashion and to feel useful, so combining the two was her idea of heaven.

"Well, that's lucky because..." she darted up from the sofa and danced gracefully to her oversized closet doors. Renesmee watched as she threw them open happily uncovering the depth of the walk-in wardrobe. Alice pulled a clothes rail from the cavernous space to the centre of the room, "Voila!" she exclaimed.

Renesmee's eyes bugged, the rail contained a selection of high-end designer dresses. They were so unlike the sort of clothes that Renesmee chose for herself, she knew that she would not be happy or comfortable wearing any of them. She took a deep breath and stood. She walked to the rail, letting her fingers trail across the fabric of the dresses as she went,

"So which ones do you like?" Alice smiled.

"They're all so...so beautiful. I don't think I can choose."

"Oh come on Ness...humour me."

Renesmee bit her lip and studied each of the dresses; she tried to decide which would look the least hideous on her. Her hand rested on a pale gold dress, the material, silk, was soft and delicate against her skin, she ran her fingers up and down its skirt, "Excellent choice," Alice smiled, "I was hoping that you'd pick that one, I mean any one of these would look stunning on you, but this is totally you...now we just have to figure out what to do with your hair."

"Alice...do you ever feel trapped?" Renesmee asked tentatively as she watched her aunt.

"Hmmm? Trapped? What do you mean?" Alice asked, jogged out of her potential plans for Renesmee's hair.

"Nothing..." Renesmee said, deflated. Alice would never understand. None of her family would. They viewed Edward's gift as beneficial, you just had to consider the number of times that her father's gift had saved them all, "So, any ideas about the hair?"

Alice regarded her carefully, she looked as if she were considering Renesmee's question, Renesmee quickly said,

"I was thinking that I might just leave it down"

It was enough to jar Alice's train of thought and bring it back to the safer topic of the party,

"Leaving it down...that could work, but we'd have to define the curls..." Alice mused.

Renesmee breathed an internal sigh of relief.

Before long, Alice was satisfied with their decisions on a dress for the party and the 'look' they would try to create with Renesmee's hair. Released, Renesmee made her way down the stairs to the front door, but before she could reach it, her father appeared from the living room,

"Hey Dad..." she said quietly.

His topaz eyes were filled with pain and remorse. She felt guilt flood her entire system,

"Renesmee..." he said brokenly.

"It's ok Dad...look I'm sorry. I didn't mean any of what I said or I thought," she lied.

"Yes, you did," he replied, coming towards her.

She held her hand up before he could fully reach her, tears sprung to her eyes,

"Please Dad, don't. I just...I just need to...I love you, but I have to..."

He stood frozen and she knew that if he could have cried at that moment, he would have. She could not look at the tortured expression; she could not withstand the weight of the guilt that bore down on her, so she turned and fled out into the driveway and headed for her car. Edward winced as the front door slammed shut behind her. He heard Renesmee trudge in her boots to his old silver Volvo. He heard her slam the door and start the engine. Then, she tore out of the driveway.

Renesmee turned up the heat in the car, gripping the wheel as she drove quickly away from the large isolated house that stood overlooking Medenhall Lake. She followed the curve of the driveway until she reached the fork in the road, signalling its end. She turned right and headed towards Auke Bay. She knew that she had been pretty hard on her Dad, but she had been embarrassed. She had been dreading the birthday party that her Aunt Alice was throwing for days – a trait that she had apparently picked up from her mother, much to her aunt's distress. She didn't want to seem ungrateful, but having her father hear exactly what she was thinking made her seem just that. Agitated, she pressed the CD player's 'on' button – the first few chords of Song 2 sounded in the car, she turned up the volume as loud as it would go.

The beauty of the dense forest that bordered the road smeared and blurred as she sped past, trying to outrun her guilt and the recent glaring truth that had been revealed to her. Terrified and unsure of how to deal with it, she had buried it away at the back of her head, loath to admit that it was the cause of her recent ill humour – that and something else; something that caused her eyes to sting each time she thought about it. She sighed as she followed the curve of the road that led down to the bay; the truth was her anxiety and seemingly endless bad mood had nothing whatsoever to do with the party, even if she was dreading it. No, her mood had much more to do with the deafening silence that derived from La Push; that and her newly discovered revelation.

She had not seen Jacob in a month and then, two weeks ago, his daily phone calls had ceased. At first she had figured that his college work must have piled up; now that the Volturi had retreated in shock for the foreseeable future, he and the packs had little to defend against and he had never been the most focused student in the world, but then nothing had ever stopped him from contacting her before. By the middle of the second week, another explanation struck her: Jacob had forgotten her because Jacob had met someone else. As she thought about it now, her entire body went numb with fear, so much so that she had to pull over. She switched off the engine and bent over, in the silence of the car the numbness was replaced with an acute pain that ripped through her body, causing her to whimper in response; still gripping the steering wheel, she laid her forehead against it and tried to fight her way through the lurid images that filled her head: Jacob smiled at a girl she didn't recognise, he used the smile that she had thought belonged only to her. He ran his fingers through the girl's long glossy black hair and his other hand pulled the girl into his lap. She laughed as she fell onto him and reached up beneath his t-shirt running her hands up his chest, their faces were close together, his nose touched hers...the images morphed, Renesmee watched as their surroundings changed. He had the girl in his bed, he held her by the waist, guiding her. He laid there mesmerised, the girl was seated on top of him, undulating, writhing, moaning...Renesmee's hands shook and her bottom lip trembled as she breathed in short gasps of air. She was having another panic attack. She felt the sting at the back of her eyes. She squeezed them shut and hoped that the storm would soon pass.

"Edward?" Bella's peeling-bell-like voice called as she walked towards the large living area.

Alarm enveloped her as she took in his defeated form. He sat at his piano, but the stool was pushed back from the keys, he was bent double, his face hidden in his hands. She flew towards him, falling to her knees beside the stool and touched his left hand,

"Edward...what's wrong? What happened?"

He did not answer her immediately; he kept his face hidden in his hands, despite her tugging at them.

"Please Edward...you're scaring me. Is it Renesmee? Is she ok?"

The very real fear in her voice wrenched him out of the quicksand he seemed to be sinking irretrievably into. He dropped his hands to his lap and straightened, he shifted to look at her. Her wide topaz eyes stared back up at him, fearful and anxious. He felt awful for making her feel that way,

"There's nothing wrong Bella..."

"Then why are you sitting here like this? Don't tell me this is nothing...I know you Edward. Tell me what's wrong."

He sighed. It was a pained and weary sound that seemed to exhaust him further. His eyes moved to the keys of the piano and a troubled expression cast a shadow over his beautiful face. He reached out with his left index finger and pressed down on middle C.

"It's Renesmee...she resents me..."

"No!" Bella insisted, "Edward, Renesmee would never feel that way about you. She loves you..."

He smiled crookedly, wryly, but his smile faltered.

"Bella she resents me" he said firmly, "She resents the fact that I intrude into her thoughts."

"She's just going through a hard time, with school..."

"No. Not school. Her recent malaise has nothing to do with something as trivial and banal as school..."

"What then?" Bella asked.

Edward struck at middle C again,

"Jacob."

"Jake? What about him?"

"It's happening Bella. Finally. We are going to lose her..."

Bella knew exactly what he meant. The icy fingers of unwanted comprehension closed around her heart.

"Her feelings have changed..." she stated.

"Yes. Her feelings have changed and she has never been more distant, so unreachable...her face when she left the house..."

"You think she wants to leave us?"

"Yes. Me especially," he hung his head in his hands again, and in an anguished voice said, "I can't let go of her Bella...I knew it would come and I thought that I would be able to accept it...but this situation with Jacob and her detachment. It isn't sufficient...it isn't enough time...she can't go...not yet."

He broke off, gripped by the sense of loss that overwhelmed and ripped at his heart. The desolation he felt was almost on a par with the devastation he had felt when he had believed that Bella was dead. Renesmee's changed feelings coupled with her increasing isolation from her family meant only one thing: they would lose her. She would belong to Jacob, with Jacob and Edward and Bella and the rest of the Cullens would fade into obscurity. He was being irrational, he realised, irrational and selfish. But he felt it nevertheless, it gnawed at him. Each one of her frustrated thoughts eroded a little more of the bond they had shared, altered the little girl who had always been content simply to sit in her father's lap, listening to him read her stories. That little girl had been slipping away ever since they had left Forks, he realised. What was more, he knew he was powerless to stop it.

Renesmee plunged her hands deep into the pockets of her jeans as she picked her way around the bay. She had passed the marina long ago and the further away she had gotten from it, the fewer people she had seen. It was a welcome change. More often than not over the last six months she had been feeling as if she were constantly surrounded, as if everyone and everything in her life had crowded in on her. Everyone except the one person she wanted to crowd her of course; he was over eight hundred miles away. It wasn't that she didn't love her family, she did, more than she could say, but the rigidity of the unit, the secrecy, the pretence had been getting to her recently; the pressure to appear normal. The party, just the latest example of this, had exacerbated her sense of being trapped. Worse still, she knew that her life would always be this way – constantly moving on, trying not to awaken suspicion; never able to put down roots or be completely honest. She knew that that was why Jacob was so integral to her life. It was something apart from the recent feelings that she had developed for him and their impact on her emotional stability.

Jacob represented life beyond the Cullens, despite his connection to them. He represented a freedom that was not accessible to her otherwise. He did not constrain her. When she was with him, she belonged. She frowned and slowed her pace, beginning to feel the familiar sensation of treachery as these thoughts entered her mind. She stopped and turned her back on the hulking mass of spruce trees and faced the vivid blue of the ocean. The autumn sun stretched its fingers towards her exposed face, caressing her cheeks, her forehead and the tip of her nose. She felt its reaction with her skin; she felt the shimmering glow suffuse her face. It was at times like these that she felt most alone, her family couldn't walk openly with her like this along Auke Bay, not on a sunny autumn day – and that wasn't their fault, she knew that. But it did not stop her wishing that they could share these things with her. It would be better if she was really like them, the same as them – if she couldn't go out in the direct sunlight, if she too shone like a multi-faceted diamond when sunlight hit her skin. It would be better if they were like her, a part of two worlds, belonging to neither one entirely. It wasn't self pity because she knew that she was not unique; there were three others besides her at least. However, in the world that she inhabited, she was unique, the only one split between two worlds, feeling the demands of both and not knowing how to reconcile herself to either one. Her ability to talk to her mother about her human inclinations had long passed; Bella barely remembered her human life. It had become hazy, soft around the edges now that the certainty of forever stood in front of her. Renesmee could not talk to the few friends that she had either because her human life was inextricably bound with her vampire life – revealing that meant something too terrible to comprehend. So, in many ways she remained isolated – unless Jacob was near. He understood what it meant to walk in two worlds and belong to neither; he and the other wolves. Treachery stabbed at her again. Then, as if to make amends, she turned and darted into the forest to hunt.

Bella stood and looked out of the picture window at the icy water of Mendenhall Lake, troubled. In three hours the entire 10th grade of Juneau-Douglas High School would descend on the large isolated house to celebrate Renesmee's 'sixteenth' birthday and Alice was going all out as usual. The house was filled with pale yellow and bright white roses, Alice's colour scheme extended to all of the decorations, even to the multi-tiered stand that held the individual cupcakes with the pale yellow icing that substituted for the large cake that Alice had wanted and Renesmee had refused to countenance. Fairy lights, tastefully draped all over the lower level of the large I-house completed the feminine, floral look.

The front door opened and Bella turned to see Renesmee enter, wrapped up in her long, navy blue winter coat and beanie hat.

"Hey Mom..." she breathed.

"Hey sweetie, where have you been?"

"Auke Bay...I needed...I just needed some time y'know?" she said, pulling off her coat and hat and laying them across the arm of the sofa.

"Yes. Your father told me you were a bit upset earlier..."

Renesmee rolled her eyes, "Not upset," she lied, "Just didn't really want an audience listening to my thoughts. Sometimes I wish Daddy couldn't hear me..."

"Renesmee, your father loves you. He's worried about you. You've been so down these last couple of weeks."

"I'm fine," Renesmee shrugged. She looked into her mother's topaz eyes and found that she clearly wasn't buying it, "Ok, so I'm not fine. But I don't want to talk about it either."

She avoided her mother's eyes, looking past her out of the window at the lake. Bella was quiet for a moment as she watched her daughter, "Has this got anything to do with the fact that Jacob hasn't called?" she asked quietly.

"Mom...I said I don't want to talk about it," Renesmee sighed, a shadow of a scowl clouding her face.

Bella frowned in frustration, "You may not want to talk about it Renesmee – but the rest of us are having to live in the atmosphere that you are creating. Don't you think it would help to talk about it?"

Renesmee looked back at her mother; she never felt fully comfortable talking with her mother about Jacob, especially as she matured beyond childhood and certainly not once her revelation became utterly apparent. Whenever she did, a look that she didn't fully recognise would take up residence in her mother's eyes. She could tell that her mother wasn't fully comfortable talking about him either, at least in relation to Renesmee herself. Right now, she knew instinctively that what she wanted was to express her feelings for Jacob, but that would not go down well with her mother. So she simply said, "Honestly Mom. I don't need to talk about it. I'm sorry if I've been making things hard – but I don't want to talk about it."